Home alarms in Almería: protected wherever you are.

How we protect you

Home security in Almería: how we protect you

A restored cortijo in the Almanzora valley rarely has just one front door. There is the kitchen door onto the patio, double doors to the pool terrace, perhaps a casita for guests and a workshop or garage with its own way in. At the free survey the technician walks all of it: a sensor on each door to the outside, camera detectors in the main rooms, the keypad by the door you actually use and, on an open plot, an outdoor detector covering the approach from the track. Because it is a wireless alarm, nothing is chased into the old stone and plaster. In an apartment at Mojácar Playa or Vera Playa the job is smaller: the front door, the terrace door and a camera detector in the lounge.

The moment a detector picks up movement, its camera records images and sound and passes them to Segurma’s Alarm Receiving Centre, which is staffed day and night, all year round. An operator looks before anything else happens. If it is the friend from Turre who checks on the house while you are away, nobody is sent. If it is someone forcing the terrace doors of a cortijo outside Zurgena, the call goes to the police with the pictures attached, the siren inside lets whoever is there know they have been spotted, and your phone tells you at the same moment. For a house down a rambla track, that is what an alarm connected to the police has to mean: the call to the police comes from someone who has already seen the intruder.

Out here the internet often arrives through a mobile router or an aerial on the roof rather than a fibre line, and a storm over the Sierra de los Filabres can take the electricity with it. Neither interrupts the 24/7 monitoring, because the control panel also reports over the 4G/5G network and has a backup battery. From the app you arm the house as you leave for Almería or Murcia airport, disarm it for whoever cleans the pool and, with the Plus kit, look round the living room from the UK. Every arming and disarming shows in the app with the time, so you can see when the people you trust have come and gone.

So when you lock the gate of a cortijo near Arboleas for a summer back in the UK, or close up a Mojácar apartment after Easter, you are not relying on someone happening to drive past. A monitored alarm does the watching for you, and the people who can deal with a break-in hear about it first, wherever you happen to be.

When nobody is there

Holiday homes, empty months and squatters in Almería

Almería’s quiet months depend on where the house is. On the coast, Vera Playa, Mojácar Playa and the complexes at Palomares are full in July and August and at Easter, then mostly shuttered from October until the spring. Inland the pattern is often reversed: many British owners spend the mild winter in the Almanzora valley and fly back to the UK for the hottest weeks, or for Christmas with family, leaving a cortijo at the end of a track where nobody may pass for days.

A house nobody can see from the road is what squatters look for. Once someone has moved in, the usual way out is through the courts, and that takes months. While the break-in is still going on, the police can act on the spot. That is why an anti-squatter alarm here has to be monitored: the camera detectors show an operator exactly what is happening, and the police hear about it while the door is still being forced, however far the house is from the village. Before you fly back to the UK, give a tag to the friend who checks the house or to your property manager, so every visit shows in the app, and tell us who has one.