Property Care
October 9, 2026
9
Niels Schuit
Winterising a Spanish villa has very little to do with frost. On the Costa del Sol the risk is water. Autumn rain arrives in volume rather than in drizzle, drains that have stood dry since May are asked to carry it, and a closed house holds moisture instead of losing it. A residence that is properly shut in October is one you can reopen in March without a repair list waiting for you.
Most owners leave at the end of the season with the house looking immaculate. Immaculate is not the same as prepared. The work that matters is largely invisible. It is the water supply isolated at the right point, the routes the rain will take cleared before it comes, the climate inside the building set so that the house breathes, and a schedule of visits agreed before anyone needs one. None of it is complicated. It simply has to be done, and done before the first serious weather rather than after it.
In northern Europe, closing a house for the winter means protecting it against freezing. Here, pipes rarely freeze. What they do is leak slowly behind a wall for four months while nobody is in the building to hear it. The purpose of the exercise is therefore different. You are reducing the number of systems left running unattended, removing the standing water that causes smells and insects, and making sure the building can shed several hundred millimetres of rain without any of it finding its way inside.
The second purpose is condition. A closed house on the coast sits in salt air at high humidity. Leather marks, timber moves, metal fittings bloom, and soft furnishings take on the smell that tells a visitor immediately that a house has been empty. That is reversible if it is managed and expensive if it is not, which is why the work belongs in the same category as the rest of your annual maintenance programme rather than in a hurried afternoon before a flight.
Málaga province takes the large majority of its annual rainfall between October and March, and it tends to arrive in a small number of heavy events rather than spread evenly across the months. A single storm can deliver in a day what the garden has had since spring. Everything that follows assumes that, not a mild winter.
Five months of dry weather leaves gutters, channels and terrace outlets full of pine needles, bougainvillea debris and dust. The first heavy rain lifts all of it at once and takes it to the nearest narrow point. Water then backs up and goes wherever it can, which on a flat roof or a sunken terrace means inwards. Clearing every outlet, every gully and every downpipe before the season starts is the single highest-value task on the list.
Check the roof and the junctions where it meets walls, parapets and chimneys. Small cracks in render and lifted flashing are invisible in August and obvious in November, by which point the water has already been in the structure for weeks. Pay attention to anything that was repaired in the previous winter, since a repair that failed once tends to fail again in the same place.
The question is not whether to turn the water off but how far to turn it off. A house with irrigation, a pool, and a caretaker visiting at intervals cannot simply be isolated at the meter and forgotten.
In practice most residences are closed with the mains isolated at the internal stopcock, the water heater drained or switched to a holiday setting, and the supplies to the irrigation system and pool plant left live on their own branches. That gives you the protection of a dry internal system without stopping the things that have to keep running. Appliance inlet taps are worth closing individually, since washing machine and dishwasher hoses are a common and entirely avoidable source of damage.
Drains need the opposite treatment. Traps that dry out stop sealing, and once the seal is gone the house smells of the drainage system and insects come up through it. A small quantity of water with a little mineral oil on top in each unused trap holds the seal for months. Where a residence has rarely used guest bathrooms, this one step prevents the complaint that most often greets an owner on arrival.
A sealed building is not a dry building. Humidity rises, air stops moving, and mould finds the cool north-facing corners, the backs of fitted wardrobes and anything stored against an external wall. Sustained indoor humidity above roughly sixty-five per cent is the point at which this becomes likely rather than possible.
The answer is a small amount of continuous management rather than a large amount of intervention. Leave internal doors and wardrobe doors open so that air can circulate. Lift upholstered furniture off the floor if the room is prone to cold. Where the house has a system capable of it, a dehumidifying or low fan setting running on a timer costs very little and does more than any absorber. Linens, mattresses and leather should be covered in breathable material, never in plastic, which traps exactly what you are trying to avoid. We cover the mechanism in more detail in our article on damp and humidity in a Spanish villa.
A pool does not stop needing attention because nobody is swimming in it. It needs less, and it needs different. Below about fifteen degrees the water consumes far less chlorine, algae growth slows, and the filtration cycle can be shortened substantially. What it cannot be is switched off. Still water in a warm autumn turns within days, and recovering a green pool costs several times what maintaining a clear one would have.
Winter cover or no winter cover is a judgement that depends on the planting around the pool and whether you intend to use the house at Christmas. A cover keeps leaf and rain dilution out and reduces the chemical load. It also hides the surface, so a covered pool still needs someone lifting the cover and looking underneath it. The seasonal detail sits in our guide to swimming pool maintenance in Spain.
Irrigation set for August will drown a garden in November. Reduce run times and frequency, or switch to a winter programme, and check that the rain sensor actually works rather than assuming it does. Growth does not stop here in winter, it changes, so the garden still needs cutting and the beds still need clearing, simply at longer intervals.
Before you leave, deal with anything the wind will move. Loose parasols, light furniture, planters on walls and unsecured pergola fabric are the items that cause damage in a storm, usually to the glass behind them. Trees close to the building deserve a look from someone who understands them, since saturated ground and wind together bring down branches that stood perfectly well all summer. Our article on garden maintenance on the Costa del Sol sets out the seasonal rhythm.
Service the air conditioning before you close the house, not when you reopen it. Filters left dirty through a damp winter hold moisture and release the smell of it into every room on the first warm day, and a fault found in October can be fixed calmly while a fault found in July cannot. If the residence has a boiler or underfloor heating that will be used for short winter visits, test it now. The same logic applies to anything you will want working the moment you walk in. There is more on this in our piece on air conditioning maintenance in a Spanish villa.
A residence is most exposed in the weeks after the season ends, when the urbanisation empties and the pattern of a house becomes easy to read. The objective is simply that the building should not look closed. Lighting on varied timers, shutters not all set in the same position, post collected rather than accumulating, and a vehicle in the drive from time to time all contribute more than any single device. Alarm and camera systems should be tested while you are still there to confirm that the notifications reach a real person who will act on them, which is the part most often left untested. We go through this in detail in our article on security for an unoccupied property in Spain.
A closed house needs someone entering it, not only driving past it. Visits that produce nothing more than a note saying all is well are of limited value. What is useful is a visit with a defined list: run every tap, flush every cistern, look under every sink, check the plant room, read the meters, open the house for an hour, and photograph anything that has changed since the last visit.
That requires the keys to be held under a clear arrangement, with a record of who has access and when. It also requires someone with the authority to instruct a trade without waiting for you to wake up in another time zone, which for some owners means a formal written authority. Our articles on key holding in Spain and on the Spanish power of attorney deal with both sides of that question. The way we structure the operational oversight of a residence is built around that single point of responsibility.
Figures vary with the size of the house, the planting, and how much of the work is already inside an existing arrangement, so treat these as indications rather than quotations. A thorough close-down of a substantial villa, taking in gutters and outlets, the water system, the pool changeover, the irrigation reprogramming and a full condition record, is commonly a day or more of coordinated work plus any trades it brings in. Ongoing caretaking visits through the closed months are typically priced per visit or as part of a monthly arrangement, and the interval you choose matters more to the outcome than the rate. Actual costs differ in every case. Our article on property management fees in Spain explains what should sit inside a fee and what should not.
Set against that, the costs of getting it wrong are not modest. Water that has been in a wall for a season is a replastering and redecoration job rather than a repair, a green pool is a chemical and labour exercise with a wait attached, and a mould problem in a wardrobe can take the contents with it.
Isolating the internal supply is normal practice. Turning everything off at the meter is usually not, because the pool plant and the irrigation still need a supply. The usual approach is to isolate the house and leave those branches live.
No. Draining a pool creates more problems than it solves, including structural ones. The water level is maintained, the chemistry is adjusted for cooler conditions, and the filtration cycle is shortened.
That depends on the residence and on what your insurer requires, and the honest answer is that a fixed number matters less than a defined list of checks carried out on each visit. Read your policy conditions on unoccupied periods before deciding.
Gentle background warmth helps, but air movement helps more. A closed room at a constant temperature with no ventilation will still accumulate moisture. Circulation and dehumidification do more than heat alone.
Usually yes where there is planting near the pool, since it reduces debris, dilution and chemical use. It does not remove the need for someone to look under it regularly.
Before the first substantial rain, which on this coast can arrive in late September. Work booked for November is often work booked after the damage.
A residence that has been closed with care behaves differently when you return to it. The air is right, the water runs clear, the pool is ready, and nothing has quietly moved in your absence. That is not luck. It is a list, carried out in the right order, by someone who is accountable for the outcome rather than for the visit.
If you would like to discuss how your residence is prepared for the closed months, and how it is looked after while you are away, request a consultation.
