Renting a villa with a pool in the Maresme sounds like the easy part of the move. Then the first summer arrives, the water turns cloudy, the pump makes a noise you do not recognise, and nobody has told you who is meant to deal with it. Spanish law gives you a principle rather than a number: the owner keeps the property fit for use, and you keep it in the state you received it. A pool sits awkwardly between those two ideas, which is why the lease almost always decides. Here is how the split actually works in practice.
Under article 21 of the Ley de Arrendamientos Urbanos, the landlord has to keep the home in a condition fit for the agreed use and carry out the repairs needed to keep it that way. The tenant, on the other side, handles ordinary maintenance and anything that comes from normal day-to-day use. A private pool is not named anywhere in that article, and the silence is exactly why almost every villa lease in the Maresme ends up spelling it out. Where the contract says nothing, the common reading is that keeping the water clean and the equipment running falls on the owner, because that is the fit-for-use part, while skimming leaves and running the pump counts as ordinary use.
If the pool belongs to a comunidad de propietarios rather than to your villa, the owner pays the community fees and those fees cover the pool, the lifeguard in season and everything around it. As a tenant you do not pay them unless your contract passes them on, and even then the LAU limits what can be shifted without it being written down and quantified. It is worth asking to see the community rules as well, because some restrict opening hours, guests or inflatables, and those rules bind you just as much as they bind the owner.
The single most useful thing you can do before signing is to find the maintenance clause and read exactly what it lists. A good one names the pool company, the visit frequency, who buys the chemicals, who pays to empty and refill the pool, who covers the pump and the heater, and what happens if the pool has to be closed. A thin one says the tenant maintains the pool and leaves everything else to argument. If the clause is thin, negotiate it, or at the very least agree in writing who calls the pool company before the first patch of green water shows up on the steps.
On the villa leases we handle week to week, the split tends to land in the same place.
Two things catch people out. First, winter. Many Maresme pools are closed or covered from October into May, and closing and reopening costs money and has to be done properly, so pin down whose job that is and whether the pool is even expected to be usable during your lease. Second, water. Catalonia has been under drought restrictions, and at points those rules have limited refilling or emptying private pools. During a restriction you may simply not be allowed to top up, whatever the contract says, and no clause can override the water authority. If you are signing in spring, ask the owner what the current rules allow.
Keep it boring and documented. Photograph the pool and the equipment on the day you move in, including the pump, the filter and the poolside valves. Agree the service schedule in writing, in the contract or by email. Report any fault in writing the day you notice it, and take a photo before the pool company touches anything, so a repair never slides into a you-broke-it conversation. If you are the owner reading this, the same advice runs the other way: name the pool company in the lease, show the tenant the schedule, and most of the arguments never start.
We are Grandiora, based on the Maresme coast, and we draft and review villa leases here every week. We can tell you what is a normal clause and what is the owner pushing his luck.
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