Nota Simple: How to Read a Spanish Registry Extract

What a nota simple is

A nota simple is an extract from the Spanish land registry — the Registro de la Propiedad — setting out who owns a property, what the registry says that property consists of, and what charges, debts and restrictions are recorded against it. It is usually two or three pages, written in dense administrative Spanish, and it is the single most informative document in a Spanish purchase.

It is an informational extract rather than a certified one. The certified version, a certificación registral, is signed by the registrar and carries legal weight in proceedings; the nota simple is the working document that lawyers, valuers and banks read every day. For deciding whether to buy something, the nota simple is what you want.

How to obtain one

Anyone can request a nota simple on any Spanish property, for a small statutory fee, without the owner's permission. The registry is public.

• Through the registrars' online service, which covers registries nationally and returns the extract electronically, usually within a day or so.
• In person or by post at the Registro de la Propiedad whose district covers the property.
• Through your lawyer, which is how it normally happens. A Spanish lawyer instructed on a purchase will pull the nota simple as their first act, before anything else.

Notas simples go stale. A charge entered last month will not appear on an extract printed last year. Get a fresh one before you pay a reservation deposit, and expect your lawyer to pull another immediately before completion.

It is not a survey. It describes the legal property, not the physical one, and the gap between the two is where most of the problems live. To request one you need the registry's own finca number or the cadastral reference; an address alone is unreliable on Spanish developments, so ask the agent for both references rather than matching by street.

How to read it

Four parts matter. Read them in this order.

The description of the property

This is the registry's account of what the property is: a flat on the third floor of a named building, a house on a plot of a stated size, a rural parcel with stated boundaries. It will give a built surface area in square metres, often a separate useful area, and for a house, the plot area. It will state the property's participation quota if it forms part of a community of owners, which is the fraction of communal costs it carries.

Check the numbers against the sales particulars and against what you walked around. A property advertised at 140 m² and registered at 95 m² is telling you something, and what it is usually telling you is that somebody extended it without registering the extension.

The owner

The titularidad section names the current registered owner or owners, states what share each holds, and says how they acquired it — purchase, inheritance, gift — and when. Confirm that the person selling to you is the person on this page. Where the property is held by more than one owner, all of them have to sell. Where it came through an inheritance, your lawyer will want to see that the inheritance was properly completed and taxed, because an incomplete succession can stall a sale for months.

Charges: the cargas section

This is the part your bank reads first. Cargas are everything registered against the property that is not ownership:

• Existing mortgages, with the lender, the original capital and the term. An existing mortgage is normal and is discharged out of the sale proceeds at completion — but the mechanism for discharging and deregistering it has to be arranged, not assumed.
• Embargoes — court or tax authority seizures securing a debt. These travel with the property, not with the person, which is the single most important sentence on this page.
• Unpaid community fees, where the community has registered a claim, and unpaid IBI, the municipal property tax, which attaches to the property for the preceding years.
• Options to buy, leases and rights of first refusal registered in favour of someone else.
• Conditions from an earlier sale, such as a developer's retained rights or a resolutory condition for unpaid price.

A clean cargas section reading libre de cargas is what you want. Anything else is not necessarily fatal, but each entry needs to be identified, valued and cleared before or at completion, and your lawyer decides what is acceptable. A lender will not register its own mortgage behind an undischarged charge it did not expect.

Easements and limitations

Rights of way, drainage rights, shared access, utility easements, and in coastal and rural areas administrative limitations such as coastal-law setbacks or protected-land classification. These are frequently the most consequential lines in the document for a rural property in the Málaga interior or the Axarquía, and the most frequently skimmed past. A neighbour's registered right of way across your drive is enforceable against you the moment you own it.

The discrepancies that cause trouble

Spain has two separate records of the same property: the land registry, which records legal title, and the cadastre, which records physical description for tax purposes. They disagree constantly, and the disagreements are not cosmetic.

1. Unregistered floor area. A terrace enclosed, a basement converted, a pool built, a second storey added — real, physical, and absent from the registry. The bank's valuer certifies the registered property, so the unregistered part is unvalued, which shrinks the loan. More on valuations coming in low →
2. A plot that does not match. Boundaries that moved, land absorbed from a neighbouring parcel, or a rural finca that was informally divided. Resolving this is a legal procedure with its own timetable.
3. Land classification. A dwelling registered on suelo rústico without the permissions to be a dwelling may be habitable and openly for sale and still be unmortgageable at any loan-to-value.
4. A missing first-occupation licence on a newer property, which the registry entry may or may not reveal but which your lawyer will check alongside it.

Regularising a discrepancy is often possible, but it costs money and takes time. The point of reading the nota simple early is that you find out while you still have the option of walking away or asking the seller to fix it.

Why your lender and your lawyer both want it

They want it for different reasons, which is why you will be asked for it twice.

Your lawyer is establishing that the seller can sell, that what they are selling is what you think you are buying, and that nothing will follow the property into your ownership. They read the nota simple alongside the cadastral record, the community's certificate of paid-up fees, the IBI receipts, the licences and the deeds. That is legal work, and it belongs with a Spanish lawyer acting for you — not for the agent or the developer.

Your lender is establishing that it can take a clean first charge over an asset it can value and, if it ever had to, sell. It will ask for the nota simple as part of the application pack, generally at the same time as the purchase contract. The full document checklist →

What we do with it is narrower: we read it to judge whether the property is financeable and whether the valuation is likely to support the loan you need. Spotting that the registry shows 95 m² where the listing says 140 m² is a five-minute job that can save a purchase. Whether a particular easement is legally acceptable is not our call, and we will say so. The complete guide to Spanish mortgages →