The Provincial Court of A Coruña has ruled in favor of the owner of a property (a cooperative) when considering that several heirs registered it in their name in the Property Registry without having any real right over it. The court has considered that the land was part of a larger property acquired by the cooperative in 1960 and that the defendants occupied it solely as settlers (people who work/use other people’s land), which is why it ordered the cancellation of the registration registration and fully confirms the previous ruling.
According to the ruling of January 28, 2026, the conflict arose when the defendants tried to claim ownership of a plot through an inheritance deed signed in 2022, with which they managed to register the property in their name. However, the cooperative filed a lawsuit when it understood that this land was already part of its historical property and that the heirs had never been owners, but rather simple occupants.
In the first instance, the Ferrol Court upheld the claim and declared that the plot belonged to the cooperative, agreeing to the cancellation of registration. The defendants appealed, alleging that the property was theirs by family inheritance, because it appeared in the land registry in their name and because they had been using it for decades, defending that they acted as owners.
The Court rejects that they were owners despite the registration of the property in the Registry
The Provincial Court of A Coruña dismissed said appeal, making it clear that the defendants did not have any valid title proving ownership. The Judgment indicated that according to article 609 of the Civil Code, property is not acquired by the mere fact of registering an asset in the Registry, but by the legally provided methods, and the registration cannot protect a non-existent right if there is no prior title that justifies it.
In this sense, the awarding of a property in an inheritance did not in itself prove ownership if it was not proven that this property was part of the deceased’s assets, as required by the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court. In this case, it could not be proven that the property belonged to the deceased from whom they claimed to inherit.
Furthermore, the Court stressed that neither the cadastre nor the prolonged occupation of the property proved ownership. The Cadastre is an administrative record for tax purposes, according to the Real Estate Cadastre Law, and its data do not determine proprietary ownership. Likewise, occupying a property for years does not automatically make you an owner if it is recognized that the owner is someone else.
Precisely for this reason, the Court ruled out usucapion, regulated in articles 1940 and following of the Civil Code, as one of its essential requirements was not met, which is possession “as owner.” According to the court, the defendants’ family used the house and the property as settlers (first for the former owner and then for the cooperative), which implied a tolerated occupation and not possession with the appearance of real property.
Furthermore, the property had never appeared in the family’s previous inheritances, it was only incorporated in a 2022 deed without proving its origin, which reinforced the nonexistence of a real right over the land.
For all these reasons, the Court concluded that the heirs had registered in their name a property of which they were not owners, which it considered a “crude maneuver” to pretend a non-existent right, and ordered the cancellation of the registration, although the ruling was not final and an appeal for cassation could be filed against it before the Supreme Court.