Upstairs or downstairs in a Torrevieja bungalow

Anyone who has bought property along this coast has met the word bungalow and found that it does not mean what it means in English. In Torrevieja a bungalow is not a single-storey house. It is a two-storey building divided horizontally into two separate homes, each with its own front door, and usually sold as two separate properties.

Understanding how yours is divided saves a surprising amount of trouble, and not only when you are locked out.

The two halves

The ground-floor unit has its own door at street or garden level and normally a terrace, often with a small private garden strip in front of it. Its outdoor space is at the same level as the living room.

The upper unit is reached by a flight of outside stairs, sometimes shared, sometimes private, and its outdoor space is on the roof: the solarium. That solarium is the reason so many of these buildings have a large aluminium door at the top of an internal staircase, which is a lock of its own and a common point of failure.

Both units usually carry the same street number. Occasionally the upper one adds a letter, occasionally it does not. On an estate of two hundred identical white buildings, “number 14” describes two front doors on the same wall.

Why it matters when you are locked out

A locksmith arriving at the address has to know which of the two doors to look at, and the two doors are often different jobs. The ground-floor door usually faces the garden and the street; the upper one faces a stair landing and takes less weather but often has a flimsier frame, because it was never expected to be a main entrance.

Saying “upstairs” or “downstairs” at the start of the call is, in practice, half the address.

The doors you own without thinking about them

A typical unit here has more locks than people expect:

• The community gate or barrier, if the estate has one. Not yours: it belongs to the community.
• The garden gate, on a ground-floor unit. Often a cheap cylinder in an exposed metal frame, in salt air, which is why it is usually the first lock in the building to fail.
• The front door itself, normally a euro cylinder.
• The terrace or solarium door, aluminium, with a multipoint mechanism.
• A storeroom, a trastero, or a garage door, sometimes with a fourth kind of lock entirely.

A single key rarely opens more than two of these. If you are tired of carrying four, several of them can usually be brought onto one cylinder standard, which is a planned job rather than an emergency one.

The shared parts, and who pays

The outside stairs, the landing and the structure of the roof are typically communal even when only one unit uses them. That matters when something breaks. A lock on your own front door is yours. A lock on a gate that serves four buildings is the community’s, and replacing it without asking is the quickest way to an awkward conversation with the administrator, who then has to key everyone else back in.

Where the line falls is written into your escritura and into the community statutes. It is worth reading once, calmly, rather than at the point where something has to be fixed.

Before a season away

If your unit is the upper one, the solarium door is the one to check before you close the place up. It is exposed to full sun, full salt and wind-blown sand, and it is the door most likely to have stopped locking properly while nobody was watching. On a ground-floor unit, the equivalent is the garden gate, for exactly the same reasons.

Neither takes more than a minute to test. Lock it, unlock it, and notice whether you had to persuade it. A door that has to be persuaded in September will not open in June.