Costa Blanca · Licensed under Ley 5/2014
The Costa Blanca holds Spain's largest and longest-established British population. That produces a case mix nothing like Marbella's: less wealth management, far more inheritance, maintenance and ordinary property trouble.
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The British presence on this coast is not recent and not seasonal. Whole urbanisations south of Alicante have been permanently occupied by British, Norwegian, Swedish, Belgian and Dutch residents for decades — many of whom arrived in middle age and have now been here thirty years or more.
That demographic fact drives the casework. The single most common instruction is inheritance: someone has died holding a property on the Costa Blanca, the family is in the UK or Scandinavia, and nobody can establish whether there was a Spanish will, what else was owned, or where a sibling who emigrated in the eighties now lives.
The second cluster is family and maintenance. Where a divorce settlement was made abroad but one party now lives in Spain, the question of whether they are cohabiting can determine an ongoing obligation — and that is a matter of documented pattern, not assertion.
The third is property in the ordinary sense: rental scams targeting people booking from abroad, occupation of homes left empty between seasons, and buyers who cannot verify what they are buying from another country.
Alicante city and the coastal belt where the foreign population concentrates:
We work the northern Costa Blanca on the same basis — Benidorm, Altea, Calpe, Moraira and Jávea — where the profile shifts and the property tends to be older and higher-value.
The province is served by first instance courts in Alicante, Torrevieja, Orihuela, Elche and Benidorm, with the Audiencia Provincial de Alicante above them. Property title is recorded at the Registros de la Propiedad of Alicante, Torrevieja and Orihuela, split by area and number.
For inheritance matters the practical point is that the property registry is local but the wills registry is national — the certificado de últimas voluntades is issued centrally, and until it is obtained nothing else can proceed.
The dominant instruction on this coast. Estates stall because a beneficiary cannot be found or a property cannot be identified.
Establishing whether two people are living together, documented over time rather than on a single occasion.
Homes left between seasons are the classic usurpación target on this coast.
Verifying that a property, a landlord or an agent exists before a deposit is transferred from abroad.
Alicante, specifically
My relative died in Torrevieja and we're in the UK. Where do we start?
With the death certificate, then the central wills certificate. Everything else in a Spanish estate depends on those two documents, and families abroad routinely spend months stuck because nobody mentioned the second one.
We think there was more property than we know about.
That suspicion is often correct and it is answerable. Spanish property ownership is a matter of record; the difficulty for a family abroad is that the registers are searched by property rather than by person, which is what an asset search is for.
Can you prove my ex-spouse is living with someone?
Where there is a legitimate interest — an existing maintenance obligation is one — cohabitation can be established through lawful observation over a period and documented in a signed report. A single sighting proves very little; a pattern is a different matter.
Do you cover Torrevieja and Orihuela Costa as well as the city?
Yes. In practice more of our Costa Blanca work sits in that southern belt than in Alicante city itself.
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