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Paperwork for foreign owners in Orihuela Costa

Your house is on the beach. Your town hall is half an hour inland.

Orihuela Costa is not a municipality: it is a district of Orihuela, whose town centre lies inland. The coastal strip — Playa Flamenca, La Zenia, Cabo Roig, Punta Prima, Villamartín — shares a town hall with a city many owners have never seen.

Which administration you belong to

Town hallOrihuela
Autonomous communityValencian Community
Holiday-let registerTourism Register of the Valencian Community (Generalitat)

We are in Rojales. Here we drive over, the same day if needed.

What catches people out here

The municipality of Orihuela is very large and very spread out, and its coast is separated from the town centre by several kilometres of countryside. Padrón formalities for Orihuela Costa are handled at the office in Orihuela city, on calle Ruiz Capdepón, not at the beach. The council has gone as far as launching a mobile office precisely because of this.

For an owner who comes for three weeks in summer that changes the arithmetic entirely: something that sounded like “drop into the town hall one of these days” turns into half a day in the car and an appointment that has to be booked from abroad, in Spanish.

Questions about this service

Are Playa Flamenca, La Zenia or Cabo Roig separate municipalities?

No. They are urbanisations and areas within the district of Orihuela Costa, and all of them come under Orihuela town hall. On an official form the municipality is Orihuela.

Is the holiday-let register the Valencian one or the Murcian one?

The Valencian one. Orihuela is in the province of Alicante and therefore in the Valencian Community, even though the Region of Murcia is a few kilometres away. It is a common confusion all along this strip, and an expensive one.

This page was last checked on 4 September 2026

Responsible for this content Sullivan Benedetto · Torrevieja (Alicante), España

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