Locks and doors · 3 September 2026 · 5 min read
The Communal Door of Your Alicante Building Is Broken: Now What?
Who decides and who pays when the communal door of an Alicante block fails, and what a resident can do tonight while the community sorts it out.
Many people in Alicante live in apartment buildings, from the blocks of the Ensanche and Benalúa to the towers of Playa de San Juan. Every one of them has at least one door that belongs to nobody in particular and to everybody at once: the street door, the portal.
When it stops closing, or the lock gives out, the questions start. Here is how it usually works.
Whose door is it?
In a building divided into flats, the street door, the entrance hall and their locks are common elements of the comunidad de propietarios, the owners’ association. Repairing and maintaining them is the community’s responsibility and is paid from its funds, in the proportions set out for the building.
In practice that means two people matter:
- The president of the community, an owner elected to represent it.
- The administrator (administrador de fincas), if the community has one, who manages repairs and pays the bills.
Their names are usually on a notice in the entrance hall or in the letterbox area.
Tonight: what a resident can do
A street door that will not lock is a security problem for the whole building, and a door that will not open traps people in or out. If it is urgent:
- Tell the president or administrator, by phone if possible, and in writing too.
- If you cannot reach anyone and the door is jammed or wide open at night, an urgent repair to keep the building secure is reasonable. Keep the invoice and photos, and pass them to the administrator.
- Tell your neighbours on the building’s group chat, if there is one, so nobody else calls out a second locksmith.
A locksmith working on a communal door will ask who authorises the job and who the invoice goes to. The answer is normally the community, care of the administrator.
What usually goes wrong with a portal
- The door closer has lost its oil and no longer pulls the door shut against the latch.
- The electric lock that the entry-phone releases has burned out or its keeper has shifted.
- The latch no longer lines up because the door has dropped on its hinges.
- The cylinder has worn out after years of daily use by every resident.
Most are quick repairs. A new cylinder for a street door also means new keys for every flat, so the community needs to decide how many to order.
Tenants
If you rent, tell your landlord or the agency as well as the community. You do not pay for communal repairs, but your landlord will want to know.
For your own landing door, the rules are simpler: it is yours or your landlord’s. If it is the one giving trouble, see how locked doors are opened.