A washing machine at one in the morning, a dog that starts at six, a chair dragged across the floor every night. The law has numbers for this. Getting anyone to apply them is the harder part.
Spain has no single national decibel limit for neighbours in a flat. Each town writes its own noise ordinance, and the autonomous community adds its rules on top. Barcelona is the reference most people quote: 25 dB(A) in a bedroom at night, 30 dB(A) in the other rooms, 30 and 35 by day. The protected night period runs from 23:00 to 07:00, and the city ordinance treats noisy domestic activity as something to avoid between 21:00 and 08:00.
Those figures are low. A modern fridge hums at around 40 dB. A normal conversation sits near 60. Which means a strict reading would make almost any shared building non-compliant. That is why cases are not decided on a single measurement. Courts and inspectors look at duration, repetition and whether the noise goes beyond what ordinary living produces.
Start with the neighbour. Not at three in the morning, and not through the wall. A note under the door with your name and a specific time works better than a shout, and it creates a first piece of paper. Half the cases end here because the person genuinely did not know the floor carried sound that way.
Then keep a log. Date, time it started, time it stopped, what it was. A phone recording helps, though it will sound worse than the room did and cannot prove decibels. If the building has a president or an administrador, send the log to them as well. The community is often the only party with a standing relationship with the flat above.
Call 092 for the local police, or 112 if it is the middle of the night and the situation feels unsafe. They can come out, listen at the door, and in some cases take a measurement. They will not break down a door over a television. What they do produce is an incident number, and a series of those is worth more than any recording you make yourself.
Be precise on the call. Noise from a flat above, repeated after 23:00, address, floor, and what you have already tried. A dispatcher who hears a coherent story sends a car. A dispatcher who hears a general complaint about neighbours does not.
Your landlord is not responsible for how the neighbours behave. No clause makes them the police of the building. What they are responsible for is handing over a dwelling that can be lived in, and for the structure and installations under article 21 of the LAU. If the noise comes through a broken window, an unsealed shaft or a wall that was illegally opened, that part is theirs.
There is also the community route. As a co-owner, the landlord can raise it at the junta, support a requirement letter to the noisy flat, or vote for acoustic work in a weak partition. A tenant cannot vote at the junta. The owner can. That is a good reason to keep the relationship civil even while you are documenting everything.
A burofax to the owner, with the log attached and a request for action within a stated period, costs 20 to 30 euros and is hard to ignore. A denuncia with the town hall puts the case into the administrative system, where noise ordinances are actually enforced. An accredited acoustics firm can measure and write a report, but expect several hundred euros and no guarantee that a judge will agree with the result.
A rent reduction for noise is possible in theory. In practice it needs agreement or a court, and courts move slowly. The stronger claim is usually against the neighbour under article 1902 of the Civil Code, not against the landlord. Which is why most tenants end up doing the boring thing: document, escalate in writing, and decide whether the flat is worth another winter.
Visit at 22:30, not at noon. Stand in the bedroom with the window closed and listen. Look at what is above and below: a bar terrace, a restaurant kitchen extractor, a lift motor, a rubbish collection point. In Barcelona the trucks come between 23:00 and 02:00 on many streets, and the glass containers make a sound like a car crash.
In the Maresme the sources change. The R1 runs close to the beach in several towns and the first train is early. A pool pump at 55 to 65 dB a metre away can sit under a bedroom window. In a villa, the neighbours are further away but the garden carries sound at night, and a summer party two plots over is not something the town hall will rush to stop.
A vivienda lease can be ended by the tenant after six months with 30 days notice, under article 11 of the LAU, with the compensation the contract sets. Keep the noise log anyway. It is the difference between leaving for personal reasons and leaving because the property was not habitable, and that difference can matter if the deposit is disputed.
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