Buying Property in Moraira: the local checks that decide the deal

I am Juan Bertomeu, lawyer, ICALI number 4643, practising on this coast since 1991, with an office in Moraira. My son Daniel handles the tax side as a tax adviser. Between us we deal with British, German and Dutch buyers here most weeks, and we are not the agent. That is the whole point of what follows.

We recorded the whole process, national rules included, as a video of one hour and twenty three minutes, and the written version is in the full Costa Blanca buying guide on our main site. Both cover the parts that are identical anywhere in Spain: NIE, reservation, deposit contract, notary, registration and the tax you pay on top. This page is only the Moraira part, the bit that changes because the house is here.

Start with the address, not the price

When a client tells me they have found a house in Moraira, my first question is never what it costs. It is where exactly.

Moraira is not a municipality of its own. It is part of Teulada-Moraira, one town hall, with the ayuntamiento up in Teulada. That is where the municipal side of your purchase belongs, and where the yearly bills are set.

Now the part that catches people, and some agents too. Cumbre del Sol is not in Moraira. It sits in the municipality of Benitachell, Poble Nou de Benitatxell, between Jávea and Moraira. If the listing says Moraira and the property is in Cumbre del Sol, then your town hall, your yearly IBI and the licensing for anything like a tourist rental all belong to Benitachell, not to Teulada-Moraira. That is not a problem in itself. It is a problem when you find out afterwards.

One more local detail that surprises buyers from abroad. Moraira has no Land Registry of its own. Teulada-Moraira sits in the registry district of Jávea, so that is where the nota simple comes from. The document everyone assumes proves ownership is issued in a different town from the one on the For Sale board.

Moraira by area, and what each one triggers

The area changes the price. It also changes the homework.

El Portet is the cove everyone knows, the most expensive corner of town, front line villas above the water. This is where the coastal law bites hardest, and it deserves its own section below.

Pla del Mar and the streets near town are usually clean legally. On older builds I still want to see the licences before anyone gets excited, because what is built and what is licensed are two different documents.

Benimeit is hillside, big sea views, and a strong German and Dutch corner of Moraira. Up there we check access rights and whether older houses sit on rustic land. That single detail decides what you are allowed to do with the property later, and it cannot be fixed after completion.

Across all of them, the villa with a plot is the dominant product here, not the apartment. A plot brings its own checklist: the pool, the boundary walls, the terraces that were glazed at some point, the extension that never reached the town hall. Every one of those is somebody's future problem. The purchase decides whose.

The front line at El Portet: some of those villas are not freehold

This is the one that shocks people, so read it slowly.

The Ley de Costas treats the first stretch of land from the shoreline as public domain, with a protection zone behind it, along the whole Spanish coast. Some of the older front line homes near the water in Moraira are not owned outright. They are held as an administrative concession, which is a right to use the property for a period, with an expiry date, and not full ownership.

That is a completely different thing to be paying a front line price for.

So on any purchase near the shore we order a coastal certificate and cross the property against the official boundary held by the coastal authority. It takes a few days. Against the price of an El Portet villa it costs almost nothing, and now and then it changes the entire deal. It is also not on the nota simple, which is exactly why it gets skipped.

What you pay on top of the price, and the trap inside it

Budget for the purchase tax, the notary, the Land Registry and your own lawyer. The rates changed on 1 June 2026 and the old numbers are still all over the internet, so I am not going to print a figure here that goes stale. The current table, with two worked examples, is in the full Costa Blanca buying guide.

Two things about the tax are worth knowing before you offer, because they are structural and they will not change with the next budget.

The first is that the tax is not always calculated on what you paid. It is calculated on the reference value the Catastro publishes whenever that figure comes out higher than your declared price. Declaring less than you paid is not a saving, it is an offence, and the tax office uses that same reference value to find it.

The second lands on the buyer and gets missed constantly. If your seller is a non-resident, the law makes you hold back 3 per cent of the price and pay it to the tax office within one month of the deed. It is an advance on the seller's tax, not yours. If it is not retained, the tax office can pursue the property, which by then is yours. In Moraira, where a large share of owners are foreign, non-resident sellers are the rule rather than the exception.

How we work with buyers in Moraira

We are not the agent, we do not take commission on your purchase, and we will tell you when a property is not worth the risk. That is what independent means.

Our office is in Moraira, with a second one in Dénia, and we work across this coast from Oliva down to Alicante, with most of our clients between Oliva and Benidorm. If you are abroad we handle the whole purchase through a power of attorney, which is how most of our non-resident clients buy. You do not need to be in Spain to complete.

Consultations are paid, and they are worth it precisely because the answer is about your street rather than about Spain in general. Send us the property details, or the address, and we will tell you which checks it triggers before you sign anything.

If what you need is the simpler ongoing job, the yearly non-resident tax return once you own, that runs online through our own low cost service at Easy210Spain. Same firm, right door.

This is general guidance, not advice on your property. Let us confirm the position for your specific case before you commit.