Every August listing on the coast says the same thing: aire acondicionado. Then you arrive in the second week of August, it is 33°C at six in the evening, and the only unit is a split above the living-room sofa while four bedrooms sit at 29°C. The word is not a lie. It is just not a specification. Here is how to read it before you sign.
Most of the Maresme villa stock was built between the late 1980s and the 2000s, when air conditioning was an upgrade rather than a default. Owners added a split in the living room first, because that is where guests sit. Bedrooms came later, or never. In Barcelona roughly 55–58% of homes have some form of cooling, and in the older hillside urbanisations of Alella, Cabrils or Sant Vicenç the share is lower than the city average, not higher.
A second pattern matters more in practice: the house may be well cooled but badly insulated. Single glazing, west-facing glass without shutters, a flat roof over the top bedroom. The unit then runs all day to hold 26°C, and the electricity bill tells you something the listing never will.
A modern 3.5 kW split draws roughly 1.0–1.2 kW while it is cooling. At €0.20–0.28 per kWh including taxes, that is €0.20–0.35 an hour. Eight hours a day through July and August lands somewhere around €100–170 for one room. A five-room villa on multisplits, plus the pool pump running six hours, is a different animal: €250–450 a month in the two hot months, more if the glazing is single and the roof is flat.
Those are estimates, not quotes. They move with the tariff, the age of the equipment and how the house is used. What matters for a tenant is simpler: who pays the electricity, and does the contract say anything about the A/C at all.
Spanish homes have a contracted power ceiling, and the breaker trips when you cross it. A villa with A/C, a pool pump, an oven and an electric water heater can easily need 9.2 kW or more. Plenty of older houses sit at 5.75 kW because nobody upgraded after the last reform. You discover this on a Sunday in August, with guests, when the whole house goes dark because someone started the dishwasher.
Ask to see a recent electricity invoice before signing. The potencia contratada is printed on it, next to the consumption. If it is 4.6 or 5.75 kW and the house has five splits, the system is theoretical. Raising the contracted power is the owner's job and takes a call to the supplier, not a reform, but it will not happen unless you ask.
Three clauses do the work. The first is the utility split: electricity in whose name, and at what point the tenant takes it over. The second is maintenance — filters and annual servicing are small money, but a gas recharge or a dead compressor is €300–900 and should not land on the tenant for equipment they did not install. The third is permission for works: if you need a unit in a room that has none, the answer is in the lease, not in a WhatsApp message.
One more line is worth insisting on in a villa: the pool pump schedule. A pump running eight hours a day in August adds real money to the bill you are about to pay, and it is usually set by whoever services the pool, not by you.
A Maresme house without cooling is perfectly liveable if it was built for it: thick walls, shutters closed by day, windows open at night when the coastal breeze arrives, ceiling fans in the bedrooms. The failure mode is a 2004 villa with floor-to-ceiling west glass and no shade, where the living room hits 31°C at nine at night and stays there. Orientation and shading decide more than the machine does.
We would rather tell you a house has one split and a good cross-breeze than let you find out in the second week of August. Ask us for the actual inventory of units, room by room, before you book flights to see it.
Send the list — four bedrooms, a study, a living room that faces west — and we will shortlist villas where the cooling actually covers it, with the electricity bills to prove it.
Ask about A/C Download the viewing checklist (PDF)