Hunting estates in Spain: land, law, and purchase

By number taken, wild boar and red deer lead Spain’s big game. The ministry recorded 483,110 wild boar and 167,692 red deer taken in 2024, with 100,776 roe deer, 40,019 fallow deer, 20,323 mouflon, 10,591 Iberian ibex, and about 2.8 million partridges; its table of game taken holds no data for the Canary Islands and only partial data for the Basque Country. Its most recent complete figures by province, for 2021, put Ciudad Real, in Castilla-La Mancha, first for both red deer and partridge; Cáceres, in Extremadura, second for red deer; and Jaén, in Andalucía, first for mouflon. Teruel, in Aragón, accounted for about 35 percent of the Iberian ibex taken that year. Castilla-La Mancha’s hunting regulation lists the mouflon and the fallow deer as naturalized game species, a category it keeps alongside that of native species.

The basic unit is the coto de caza, a continuous stretch of land declared a hunting ground by the regional authorities. Andalucía and Extremadura call the privately held kind a coto privado de caza. Castilla-La Mancha’s 2015 law renamed its cotos privados simply cotos de caza, the term Castilla y León’s 2021 law also uses. Minimum areas differ: 250 hectares in Castilla-La Mancha and Castilla y León, and 500 hectares for a big-game coto in Andalucía and Extremadura.

Game fencing is regulated separately, and in all four regions a fence built to hold big game needs the region’s authorization. Castilla-La Mancha requires at least 1,000 contiguous hectares for a coto’s principal game fence, Andalucía 2,000 hectares for a cercado de gestión, which runs around a hunting ground’s whole perimeter, and Castilla y León 250 hectares for a big-game fence. Extremadura classes a big-game coto as cerrado when the free movement of big game is permanently blocked over more than half its area.

No coto may be hunted without a management plan approved by the regional authorities and signed by a qualified technician. The plan sets which species may be hunted, by which methods, and in what numbers. Its name varies: Plan Técnico de Caza in Andalucía and Extremadura, Plan de Ordenación Cinegética in Castilla-La Mancha, and plan cinegético in Castilla y León. As a rule it runs for five years in Castilla-La Mancha and Andalucía and for five hunting seasons in Castilla y León. Hunting rights can be leased apart from the land, and in Castilla-La Mancha a tenant who leases the whole coto for the plan’s full term may hold the plan with the express consent of the holder of the hunting rights.

The montería is a driven hunt for big game: packs of hounds, the rehalas, work a covert ringed by hunters on fixed posts. As a general rule Castilla-La Mancha allows one montería, or two of the smaller ganchos, per 500 hectares of coto each season, and excludes ibex and roe deer from both. Every big-game species there may be hunted by stalking, the rececho, in which the hunter seeks the animal without beaters, including during the rut where the plan provides for it. In the ojeo, beaters drive small game such as partridge toward a line of hunters on fixed posts; partridge are also walked up in line or, where the region allows the perdiz con reclamo, drawn to a hunter at a fixed post by a male decoy partridge. Each region sets its own seasons. Castilla-La Mancha issues an order for every season, and its 2026-27 order sets the general season for red deer, fallow deer, mouflon, and wild boar from October 8 to February 21.

A hunting estate can also earn from the land. Andalucía’s dehesa law defines the dehesa as a holding of open woodland of holm oak, cork oak, gall oak, or wild olive over pasture, run mainly for extensive grazing, with forestry, hunting, or farming uses alongside, and singles out cork among its products for its local importance. Cork is stripped from the living tree at intervals of several years, and timber and firewood harvests are regulated by each region’s forestry authority. A farming business on an estate may hold entitlements to the European Union’s basic income support. In Spain these can be sold or leased with or without land, but, except on succession, only to an active farmer, and only an active farmer can collect the payments. Whether entitlements pass with an estate is settled in the sale contract. An owner who does not farm can lease the land, with its entitlements, to an active farmer.

Due diligence on a hunting estate covers the remaining term of the plan and what it authorizes, any lease of the hunting rights and its expiry, the authorization behind each fence, and the annual reports of game taken. Beyond rainwater, standing water, and up to 7,000 cubic meters a year from its own springs and wells, an estate’s use of water rests on a concession entered in the river basin authority’s Water Register, or on older private rights kept under transitional rules. Drove roads, the vías pecuarias, are public property of the regions and cannot be sold, including where they cross a private estate. Inside a declared protected natural area, the region holds a right of first refusal over sales, and the Land Registry will not record a transfer without proof that the region was notified. A similar right covers forest land above a size each region sets and forests declared protective; for land within or next to a public forest, it belongs to the owner of that forest. In those forest sales, notaries and registrars may not authorize or record the deed without proof of notification. Notification is a standard step before the deed is signed, and for forest land the region has three months to respond.

Spain does not generally restrict the purchase of rural land by foreign nationals. The exception is a set of zones restricted for reasons of national defense. They include all the islands, the coast of Galicia, a band along the border with Portugal down to Huelva, and the border with France, as well as the areas around Cartagena, the Strait of Gibraltar, and the Bay of Cádiz. In these zones, buyers from outside the European Union need authorization from the Ministry of Defense, as do Spanish and other EU companies in which such buyers hold more than half the capital or decisive control. The authorization is requested before the deed is signed, with the buyer’s criminal record certificate and plans of the property; it takes several months and is built into the timetable of the sale. Notaries may not authorize the deed without it, and such a purchase must be registered within eighteen months. The sale is signed as a public deed before a notary, where the parties must show their tax identification numbers; for a foreign individual this is the NIE, which can be requested through a Spanish consulate. A purchase by a nonresident above a set value is also reported as foreign investment through the notary who authorizes the deed. The deed is then entered in the Land Registry, since an unregistered title cannot be asserted against third parties. A sale of rural land generally carries transfer tax, at a rate each region may set; value-added tax arises only on some sales by a business, since rural land is generally exempt. Whether to hold an estate personally or through a company is a question for Spanish legal and tax advisers before an offer is made.