The interdicts in Spanish property law: summary possession protection under LEC Article 250 and when to use an interdicto de retener, recobrar or obra nueva (2026)

A property owner on the Costa del Sol who finds squatters in an empty house, a neighbour’s new building blocking their view, or a boundary fence quietly moved across their line faces one question first: how do I stop the harm before a full lawsuit finishes, without waiting years for a declaratory judgement. Spanish law answers with the interdicto, a summary possessory action that protects possession in weeks rather than years. The current Ley de Enjuiciamiento Civil (LEC) dropped the historical name from its operative text and frames the procedure as tutela sumaria de la tenencia o posesion in Article 250.1.4, but doctrine, practitioners and the Tribunal Supremo still use the word. This guide sets out the four interdictos recognised in Spanish practice, the Article 250.1 routing, the one-year deadline of Article 439.1, the juicio verbal mechanics of Articles 438 to 444, and how each remedy maps to a real possessory problem a foreign owner may meet.

What is an interdicto and why does Spanish law still use it?

An interdicto is a summary possessory action that protects the factual possession of a thing or right, without deciding who owns it. The 2000 LEC deliberately renamed the procedure because the old LEC of 1881 had fragmented interdictos into a clutter of historical forms. The new text folds them into the juicio verbal under Article 250.1, but the four practical categories survived: retener (keep possession against a perturbation), recobrar (recover possession after a completed despojo), obra nueva (suspend a construction that harms your possession) and obra ruinosa (demolish a ruin that threatens damage).

The defining feature is speed. The interdicto is a sumario procedure, meaning the court looks at possession, not title, and reaches a fast decision. Article 438.2 LEC states that reconvencion is not admitted in verbal judgments that, by law, end without cosa juzgada, which is the legal way of saying the interdicto’s sentence does not settle the ownership question. The loser can still bring a full declaratory action, the accion reivindicatoria, on the underlying title. The interdicto freezes the situation while that plenary action runs, and that is the whole point: a property owner being dispossessed cannot wait two to four years for a declaratory judgement to be enforced.

The Spanish land registry matters here because an inscription is the strongest evidence of a right to possess, and the registration process is what gives that evidence its priority. A registered owner who is perturbed or despojado has the cleanest possible standing to file an interdicto.

How does Article 250.1 LEC route the four interdictos?

Article 250.1 LEC lists the matters that the juicio verbal decides regardless of amount. The four interdicto categories appear at numerals 4, 5 and 6 of that list, plus a related possession rule at numeral 3. The routing is mechanical: the court decides which numeral the facts fit, and that numeral dictates the procedure’s special rules.

Article 250.1 numeral	Interdicto category	What it protects	Typical trigger
3	Hereditary possession	Possession of inherited goods not held by another	Heir takes possession of a vacant inherited dwelling
4	Retener and recobrar	Tenencia or posesion against perturbation or despojo	Squatting, boundary encroachment, neighbour blocking access
5	Obra nueva	Suspension of a construction harming your possession	Neighbour’s new build blocks view, encroaches on land, or threatens structure
6	Obra ruinosa	Demolition of a ruin threatening damage	Adjacent building in state of ruin threatens collapse onto your property

Numerals 1 and 2 of the same article cover tenant eviction and the recovery of a finca held in precario, which are related possessory actions but not interdictos in the strict sense. The tenant eviction process is governed by the Ley de Arrendamientos Urbanos, not by the interdicto rules, and the comodato and precario route is a plenary action under Tribunal Supremo doctrine, not a summary one.

What is the interdicto de retener and when does it apply?

The interdicto de retener protects a possessor who still holds the property but is being perturbed in their enjoyment. The perturbation must be active, must come from an identifiable third party, and must affect the possession itself, not merely the use. A neighbour who erects a fence slightly over the boundary, a contractor who starts working from your land without permission, or a person who repeatedly blocks your access road all fit this category.

The remedy is a court order to abstain in future from any act of perturbation. Because the possessor still holds the thing, the procedure is about confirming the right to peaceful enjoyment, not about restitution. Article 441 LEC sets out the special initial rules: for the dwelling-recovery sub-case of numeral 4, the court can require the occupants to produce a possessory title within five days of notification, but for a retener case the standard juicio verbal admission under Article 437 applies.

The line between retener and recobrar matters because the facts must match the remedy. If the perturbation has not yet succeeded in dispossessing you, the demand should ask to retener. If the despojo is already complete, the demand should ask to recobrar. The common mistakes buyers make in Spain include confusing the two and asking for the wrong remedy, which can force a reframing that costs weeks.

What is the interdicto de recobrar and how does the dwelling track work?

The interdicto de recobrar applies when possession has already been taken from you, the despojo is consummated, and you want restitution. The textbook case is squatting: a person enters your empty dwelling without consent, and you want them out without waiting for a full ownership action.

Ley 5/2018, de 11 de junio (BOE-A-2018-7833) added a faster sub-track for dwellings to Article 250.1.4, in a second paragraph. A physical-person owner, a non-profit entity with a right to possess, or a public social-housing entity deprived of a vivienda without consent can ask for inmediata recuperación de la plena posesion. Article 441.1 bis LEC, also added by Ley 5/2018, says the demand is notified to whoever is inhabiting the dwelling, plus any unknown occupants, and if the claimant asked for immediate restitution the decree of admission requires the occupants to produce a possessory title within five days. If they do not, the court orders desalojo and immediate delivery of possession to the claimant, provided the claimant’s title is sufficient to prove their right to possess. The same article allows the notification officer to be accompanied by police to identify the occupants.

This is the procedural backbone of the dwelling recovery route that foreign owners of second homes on the Costa del Sol most often rely on. The five-day title-production window is the practical reason why having your land registry certification accessible matters: without a clean title document, the immediate-restitution order cannot issue. The nota simple is the quickest documentary proof, and an independent lawyer is required to file and steer the procedure.

What is the one-year deadline and why is it absolute?

Article 439.1 LEC sets a hard deadline: a demand to retener or recobrar possession is not admitted if filed more than one year from the act of perturbation or despojo. The clock runs from the day the disturbance happened, not from when the owner discovered it. This is a plazo de caducidad in practical terms, not a prescripcion that can be interrupted by the usual civil-law mechanisms, and the court checks it on its own motion at the admission stage.

The consequence is that an absent owner who only discovers a squatting six months after it started still has six months to file, but one who discovers it after fourteen months is out of time for the interdicto and must fall back on a plenary action or the criminal route. Documenting the date of the perturbation, with a police atestado, a neighbour’s witness statement or a dated photograph, is the single most useful step an owner can take to preserve the interdicto route.

The obra nueva and obra ruinosa interdictos have no equivalent statutory deadline in Article 439, but doctrine treats the right to suspend a work as lost once the obra is finished, because the summary suspension mechanism only makes sense while construction is under way.

How does the interdicto de obra nueva suspend a construction?

Article 250.1.5 LEC covers the demand that asks the court to resolve, with summary character, the suspension of an obra nueva. The most striking procedural feature is in Article 441.2: before the demand is even answered, the court directs an immediate suspension order to the owner or encargado of the works. The owner can offer a caucion to continue the works, or to carry out only the parts indispensable to preserve what is already built. The court can also order a judicial, expert or joint inspection before the vista.

This is the sharpest tool a property owner has against a neighbour’s threatening construction. If a building next door is about to block an established view, encroach on a servitude of way, or undermine your structure, the suspension order freezes the works on the day the demand is admitted. The court then hears the parties at the vista and decides whether to confirm the suspension or lift it against a caucion.

Tribunal Supremo doctrine (STS 149/2022, 28 February 2022, among many) frames the obra nueva interdicto as bounded by Article 250.1.5: where the perturbation comes from a construction, the procedure is the obra nueva one, not the general tutela sumaria of numeral 4. The boundary between the two can be subtle, and an experienced lawyer will frame the demand under the correct numeral to avoid a reframing that would lose the immediate suspension benefit.

How is the interdicto de obra ruinosa different?

Article 250.1.6 LEC covers the demand that asks the court to resolve, with summary character, the demolition or collapse of a work, building, tree, column or any analogous object in a state of ruin that threatens to cause damage to whoever demands. The classic case is an adjacent structure visibly failing, a wall or a tree about to fall on your property.

The procedure is the juicio verbal of Articles 438 to 444, but the remedy is demolition or removal, not suspension. The court will typically order a pericial inspection to confirm the state of ruin, then decide whether the demolition is justified. Because the threat is to physical safety rather than to possession stricto sensu, the obra ruinosa interdicto sits closer to a preventive-damage action than a pure possessory one, but it shares the summary-character framework of the other three.

What are the limits of the interdicto and what comes after?

Three limits matter for any owner considering the interdicto route. First, it produces no cosa juzgada. Article 438.2 LEC bars reconvencion in verbal judgments that end without cosa juzgada, and the summary nature of the interdicto means the loser can still file a full declaratory action on the underlying title. A squatter removed under the interdicto de recobrar can still bring an accion reivindicatoria if they genuinely believe they have title, though in practice this is rare. Second, the one-year deadline of Article 439.1 is a real gate: miss it and the interdicto route is closed. Third, the interdicto protects possession, not the broader bundle of ownership rights, so a dispute about the validity of a sale or a boundary line in the cadastral map needs a plenary action, not an interdicto.

The interdicto is also distinct from adverse possession (usucapion), which is the long-period mechanism by which a possessor acquires ownership. The interdicto is the short-period shield; usucapion is the long-period sword. An owner who tolerates a perturbation for more than a year loses the interdicto, and over the much longer statutory periods (10 to 20 years depending on whether the possessor acts in good faith and with just title) may even face a usucapion claim. Acting within the one-year window is therefore both a recovery tool and a defence against future title loss.

For non-resident owners, the practical sequence is simple: document the perturbation, obtain the land registry certification, instruct an independent lawyer the same week, and file the interdicto within the Article 439.1 year. The procedure is fast by design, and the Ley 5/2018 dwelling track can produce a desalojo order in a matter of weeks where the occupants cannot produce a title. The interdicto is not a substitute for resolving title itself, but it is the fastest way to restore the factual situation while the broader questions, if any, run their course.