Catalonia spent 2023 and 2024 arguing about pools and lawns, then the reservoirs filled up and everyone relaxed. The rules never went away — they are sitting in the decree, waiting for the next dry spell. If you rent a house with a pool or a garden, this is the framework you will meet again, and the parts worth putting in the lease now, while everyone is still friendly.
The first thing to understand is that drought status is declared by water system and municipality, not by the whole region on the same day. The Agència Catalana de l'Aigua runs the framework, but your town hall publishes what it means for your street. Two towns twenty minutes apart can be in different phases, especially when one depends on a reservoir and the other on groundwater.
The phases, from mild to brutal: pre-alerta, alerta, excepcionalitat, and emergència in three levels. Most of 2026 has been spent coming out of emergency rather than going into it. Reservoirs recovered through 2025, Barcelona moved back to pre-alert and alert, and the strict 2023–24 bans on filling private pools and watering gardens were lifted. Which is exactly why people stopped reading the notices. The decree is still there. When the next dry winter arrives, the same restrictions switch back on without a new law being written.
In alerta — the middle of the range, and the one most of the coast has seen recently — a private garden can be watered at most two days a week, between 20:00 and 08:00, with the minimum amount needed and an allocation cap of 450 m³ per hectare per month. In practice that means drip irrigation at night, not a sprinkler at noon, and a lawn that survives rather than thrives.
In excepcionalitat the lawn goes. Watering is limited to «survival» irrigation of trees and plants, by watering can or drip, at night. In emergència, private gardens cannot be watered at all, whatever the source. That last clause catches people out: it applies to a well too. A private borehole does not give you a personal exemption when the system is in emergency.
A normal villa pool of 8×4 metres and 1.2–1.8 metres deep holds 40–50 m³, which is 40,000–50,000 litres. In an ordinary year, filling it from the mains costs roughly €100–200 on a Spanish water bill, more once you climb into the higher tariff blocks. That is not the expensive part. The expensive part is the garden, the irrigation and the fact that a pool left half-empty through a hot summer is a structural problem waiting to happen.
Here is the awkward bit. If the water bill is in your name — common in a long-term villa let — the pool and the garden are your consumption, and in a drought year your bill and your legal exposure both go up. The owner still owns the asset and still wants it maintained. Nobody wrote a clause for «the Generalitat banned refilling in June».
The law does not give you an automatic rent reduction when restrictions arrive, and «force majeure» is a much narrower idea in Spanish contract law than people hope. What you can do is agree the mechanics in advance. It is a five-minute conversation when the sun is out and a very different one in July.
A pool is a promise that the house will be pleasant in August. In a dry year, the promise gets renegotiated by a government decree, and no lease clause changes the weather. If a private pool is the reason you are renting the house, check the current phase before you sign, and ask what happened to the pool in 2023. Owners remember. The honest ones will tell you whether they had to drain it.
And a small practical note that saves arguments: keep the pool covered when nobody is in it. A cover cuts evaporation dramatically, keeps the water warmer in spring, and makes the «we had to top it up every week» conversation shorter. It is also the first thing an owner notices you are doing right.
We can tell you which Maresme towns were hit hardest in the last drought, what the current phase is, and how to write the pool and garden clauses so nobody has to argue in July.
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