Home alarms in Cádiz province: protected wherever you are.

How we protect you

Home security in Cádiz province: how we protect you

Take a single-storey chalet among the pines at La Barrosa in Chiclana, the kind of house that fills up in August and sits behind a locked gate the rest of the year. The free survey starts outside, with an outdoor alarm: a detector watching the garden, because the trees hide anyone crossing the plot. Sensors go on the porch door and on the sliding doors to the terrace. Inside, camera detectors cover the living room and the corridor to the bedrooms, the keypad sits by the door you use, and the siren goes where it is heard all through the house. The deterrent sign goes on the gate, where anyone walking down the sandy lane will see it.

This is what a monitored alarm connected to the police does for a beach house in Zahara de los Atunes that you closed up after the summer. On a wet night in January, someone forces the kitchen door. The camera detector in the sitting room picks up the movement, with images and sound, and someone at Segurma’s Alarm Receiving Centre goes through what it captured before picking up the phone. If there really is somebody in the house, those pictures go to the police, the siren inside makes it plain they have been noticed, and your phone in London lights up with the alert. If it is the neighbour from the next street checking on the house after a storm, nobody is sent.

Owners of summer houses in Conil, Vejer or El Puerto de Santa María mostly run their home alarm system from the UK. The Segurma app arms the house as you leave in September, shows every alert through the winter and lets you disarm it in June for whoever cleans the pool at Novo Sancti Petri before you arrive. With the Kit Tranquilidad Plus you also get live view, with sound, from the IP camera, so when an alert says the terrace door of your house in Roche has opened, you can look for yourself while the centre deals with it.

Fibre is usually fine in Sotogrande and the newer developments, but a house in the campo between Conil and Vejer, or a cortijo outside Jerez, can sit at the end of a patchy line, and a winter storm can take the power out. The control panel has two ways to reach the centre, the internet and the 4G/5G mobile network, and a backup battery for when the power goes, so a bad line or a storm does not cut the house off. That is what second home security on this coast should feel like: you lock up in Caños de Meca after the summer and stop thinking about it until the next one, because if anything happens, a person sees it, the police are told, and so are you.

When nobody is there

Holiday homes, empty months and squatters in Cádiz province

On the Costa de la Luz the year turns on the summer. Beach houses in Zahara, El Palmar, Caños de Meca and Conil fill up in July and August, open again at Easter, and stand shuttered for most of the months in between, while whole streets of holiday chalets in Roche and La Barrosa go quiet once the schools go back. Sotogrande follows its own calendar: busy through the summer and the August polo, calmer from October, with many owners living in London, Madrid or Gibraltar and coming when they can. A house with sand against the door and nobody around since September is exactly what burglars and squatters look for.

For a beach house in El Palmar, the bigger worry is often not a burglar who leaves with the television but someone who changes the lock and stays. Once squatters are living in a house, the way out is usually through the courts, and that takes months. Caught while the door is still being forced, it is a matter for the police there and then. So an anti-squatter alarm here is monitored and checked on camera, and the Alarm Receiving Centre passes the images to the police during the break-in. Give a tag to the neighbour in Conil who stays all winter or to your property manager in Sotogrande, and the app shows you every visit.