Contenido vs Continente: What a Spanish Policy Actually Covers

Two words on your policy schedule decide whether a claim is paid in full or paid in part: continente and contenido. They look like they should mean container and content, and roughly they do — but the figures written beside them are what an adjuster works from after a fire, a burst pipe or a storm. Get either number wrong and the shortfall is yours.

What continente actually means

Continente is the structure. Not just the shell, but everything permanently attached to it:

• Walls, roof, floors and ceilings.
• Fitted kitchen and bathroom units.
• Built-in wardrobes.
• Garage, pool, boundary walls and gates.
• Permanent installations such as plumbing, wiring and solar panels.

The test is usually whether it would stay with the property if you sold it. A fitted kitchen stays, so it is continente. The fridge inside it goes with you, so it is not.

What contenido covers

Contenido is everything you would take if you moved out: furniture, white goods, clothing, electronics, tools, personal effects and valuables. People consistently underestimate this figure because they price it from memory rather than by walking through the house room by room and adding up replacement costs.

A useful sanity check when you buy contents insurance is to ask what it would cost to refurnish the property from empty, at today's prices, not what you originally paid.

Rebuild cost is not market value

This is the single most common error on Spanish policies. Continente must be insured at rebuild cost — what it would cost to construct the building again — not at market value and not at what you paid for it.

Purchase price includes the land, and land does not burn down. A coastal apartment bought for €400,000 might carry a rebuild cost closer to €150,000, because most of what you paid for was location. Insure it at €400,000 and you pay premium every year on a sum the insurer would never have to pay out. Insure it at €60,000 and you have the opposite and far more expensive problem.

The regla proporcional, with numbers

The regla proporcional — the proportional rule, known in English policies as average — is the mechanism that turns underinsurance into a reduced payout. If the sum insured is lower than the true value at the time of the loss, the insurer settles claims in that same proportion.

Take a house with a genuine rebuild cost of €200,000, insured for €120,000. That is 60% of value. A kitchen fire causes €40,000 of damage. The claim is well inside the sum insured, so most owners assume it is paid in full. It is not:

• Rebuild cost: €200,000
• Sum insured: €120,000, or 60%
• Damage: €40,000
• Settlement: roughly €24,000 — 60% of the loss

The remaining €16,000 is yours. Nothing was excluded and nothing was mis-sold. The policy simply treated you as your own insurer for the 40% you chose not to buy.

How to estimate a rebuild figure

You do not need a formal valuation to get within a sensible range, though for an unusual or high-value property a surveyor is money well spent. For an ordinary house:

• Take the built area in square metres, including garage and covered terraces.
• Multiply by a local construction cost per square metre — most Spanish regions sit somewhere in the region of €900 to €1,600 per m² for standard build quality, higher for bespoke or difficult-access sites.
• Add demolition and debris removal, professional fees and licence costs.
• Add pool, boundary walls, terracing and outbuildings separately — they are easy to forget and expensive to rebuild.

These are indicative figures only. Your ayuntamiento, architect or builder will have a far better sense of current local rates than any national average.

Why your sums insured drift out of date

Building costs have risen sharply in recent years, and labour and materials are the whole of a rebuild figure. A sum insured that was accurate when you took the policy out can be 20% or 30% short a few years later without you touching anything.

Most policies apply an automatic annual revaluation, but it is a blunt index and it does not know about your new pool or extension. Review both figures when you renew your home insurance, and always after building work.

Flats: what the comunidad already covers

If you own an apartment, the comunidad de propietarios holds a block policy covering the building structure and communal areas. That genuinely reduces how much continente you need to buy individually, so a home insurance policy for a flat is usually weighted towards contenido. It does not remove the need entirely.

• Your own fittings and improvements — kitchen, bathrooms, flooring, built-in wardrobes, air conditioning — are typically yours to insure.
• The community policy usually carries its own excess, and it will not pay for your furniture or belongings.
• Damage you cause to a neighbouring flat is a liability question, and it is worth checking which policy responds.

Inner limits on jewellery, cash and valuables

Contents cover is not a single flat pot of money. Policies apply sub-limits to particular categories, and these catch people out at claim time:

• Jewellery is often capped at a percentage of the contents sum, with a further per-item limit.
• Cash in the home is limited to a modest fixed amount.
• Belongings temporarily away from the home have their own, lower limit.
• Items above a stated threshold must usually be declared individually, and some insurers require them to be kept in a fixed safe for full cover to apply.

Where underinsurance hurts most

The proportional rule bites hardest on the largest losses. In a wildfire or a serious flood, the damage is not a €5,000 water leak — it is structural, and it may be a total loss. Extraordinary risks of that kind are handled in Spain through the Consorcio de Compensación de Seguros, and its compensation is calculated by reference to the sums insured on your policy. An out-of-date continente figure therefore limits your recovery in exactly the scenario you bought cover for.

Pull out your policy schedule this week, find the two numbers, and ask yourself what it would genuinely cost to rebuild and refurnish from nothing today — then talk to your insurer or a gestoría if the answer is not close.