Spain's Horizontal Property Law: Blocking EV Chargers in Shared Garages

Article 7 of the Horizontal Property Law: The legal route to block an EV charger in your garage

Can a homeowners' association prevent someone from installing an electric vehicle charger in the common garage? There is a legal answer, and it is not what many expect. The Ley de Propiedad Horizontal (Horizontal Property Law), a text from 1960 that remains in force, dedicates its Article 7 to prohibitions on the use of common elements. This is where litigation arises: one line of analysis argues that installing the charger is not the same as charging the car. The installation does not alter building safety. Charging does.

The starting point is a reform allowing the installation of charging points in community garages without prior authorization from the board. On paper, the owner can do this. In practice, the conflict shifts to usage: those who introduce new risks into shared spaces, this thesis argues, are obligated to neutralize them. And an electric vehicle charging introduces, according to firefighters cited in the matter, a risk that did not exist before.

What Article 7 says about using the community garage

Article 7 of the Ley de Propiedad Horizontal prohibits owners from carrying out activities in their flat or premises that are damaging, inconvenient, or dangerous to the property. The key word is dangerous. Actual damage need not occur; it suffices that the activity introduces an objective risk to the building or other residents.

Applied to a garage, the reasoning is as trinc. A parked combustion engine car has a known and limited risk. An electric vehicle adds a different risk: a lithium battery that, if it fails, burns at temperatures conventional methods cannot control. This is not an opinion: specific firefighter protocols exist for battery fires, and their mere existence, proponents argue, proves the risk is new.

The practical consequence is that the community does not need to ban the car. It only needs to require that whoever introduces it pays for measures restoring the garage to its previous safety level. These measures are not cheap: professional risk studies, mitigation plans, automatic sprinklers, temperature sensors, refractory walls between spots. All at the expense of the electric vehicle owner.

Safety measures required for electric cars in community garages

The list circulating in technical circles is long and growing. Early temperature detection per spot. Automatic extinction specific to lithium batteries. Lateral refractory insulation to prevent chain-fire propagation. And, in extreme cases, banning access to lower floors.

Catalonia has already taken the first step: regulations prohibit parking electric vehicles in basement levels -2 or below. For defenders of this thesis, this is not an isolated case but the first degree of restrictions that will increase. They draw parallels with environmental labels: a diesel car may comply with regulations, pass inspections, and be up-to-date on taxes, yet still be banned from certain zones. With electric vehicles, they say, the same will happen: the car is legal, but it cannot enter certain buildings.

This argument has an obvious counterpoint. An electric vehicle is not a butane canister or a toaster. Modern batteries include thermal management systems and safety protocols. Most documented fires, critics of the restrictive thesis argue, correspond to precarious installations, non-homologated chargers, or modified vehicles. Statistics, they add, do not support exceptional treatment.

The Alcorcón fire and the argument turning against itself

The debate shifted with a specific incident: a garage fire in Alcorcón where two firefighters died and seven were injured. According to data used by this current, the involved vehicle was not charging and was outside its designated spot. That is, none of the mitigation measures demanded of electric vehicle owners would have helped.

That detail dismantles the simplest version of the argument. If the problem is not charging but the presence of the vehicle, then requiring sprinklers and refractory walls solves nothing. Some draw a more radical conclusion: do not ban charging, ban access to underground garages. "We will learn this with dead bodies," summarizes one of the most cited interventions.

The flaw in that logical leap is converting a specific case into a general rule. A fatal fire does not prove all electric vehicles are unsafe. It proves that when they fail, consequences are severe and difficult to manage. The relevant question is not whether the risk exists, but whether it is proportional to usage and who should bear its cost.

Who pays the extra cost: the insurance route

Here enters the actor no one mentions and who will likely decide the issue before any judge: the insurer. If the presence of charging electric vehicles increases property risk, the community policy should reflect it. And a premium increase is, in practice, an economic ban: most neighbors will not pay more to benefit a few.

The mechanism is simple. The community informs the insurer of existing charging points. The insurer evaluates, accepts, or rejects the risk, and adjusts the premium. If the rise is significant, the conflict ceases to be technical and becomes a stairwell vote. In that arena, the electric vehicle owner starts at a disadvantage.

The judicial route also has limits. A generic ban approved by simple majority in a meeting is likely to be overturned by a judge, because electric vehicle usage is encouraged by regulation and not classified as a dangerous activity. For a restriction to be solid, a statutory change is needed, approved unanimously, registered, and unchallenged within the deadline. That is, nearly impossible.

What better withstands potential judicial scrutiny is individualized requirements: whoever installs a charging point must present a risk study and assume mitigation measures. This is not a ban, but a condition. And conditions, if technically well-founded, are harder to overturn than blanket bans.

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Ultimately, the discussion is not about cars. It is about who bears the cost of a technology sold as a transition but managed as an externality. The electric vehicle owner wants their charger. The community wants its garage without shocks. The insurer wants its premium adjusted to risk. And the judge, when they arrive, will want a technical report defining that risk. Meanwhile, the only consensus seems to be that something will burn before anyone decides who pays the bill.