Home alarms on the Costa Brava: protected wherever you are.

How we protect you

Home security on the Costa Brava: how we protect you

Home security on the Costa Brava is mostly holiday home security, and it has to fit the way these houses are used. A villa above the coves of Aiguablava or Sa Riera in Begur, an apartment over the beach in Tossa de Mar or Lloret de Mar, a stone masia in the fields around Pals: most are opened up at Easter, lived in through July and August and then locked while their owners fly back to the UK or Ireland. Plenty of English speakers who live in Barcelona keep a house here too, so the place in Calonge may only see them one weekend a month.

What we fit follows the way in: in a Begur villa that means the sliding doors onto the terrace and the pool, in a Platja d’Aro apartment the entrance and the balcony, and in a masia the heavy wooden doors on two or three sides of the yard. Each gets a sensor, and camera detectors watch the rooms an intruder would have to cross, such as the living room and the stairs. If a terrace door in Sa Riera is forced on a February night, those detectors send images and sound to Segurma’s Alarm Receiving Centre. An operator checks them, and if it is a real break-in the police are called with the pictures in hand while the siren inside lets the intruder know the house is not as empty as it looked.

You hear about it in the same moment, whether you are in Surrey, Dublin or at your desk in Barcelona. The app lets you arm the alarm if you forgot on the way to Girona airport, and disarm it for the person who checks the house in Calella de Palafrugell after a storm. The control panel uses the internet and the 4G/5G mobile network and has a backup battery, so a power cut when the tramontana brings a line down near Roses, or a fibre outage in a village behind Begur, does not leave the house unwatched.

That is what a monitored alarm with 24/7 monitoring is for on this coast: someone awake and looking at your house when the lanes of Begur are empty and the restaurants in L’Escala have closed for the winter. You do not need to ask a neighbour in Roses to go round after every gale, or spend January wondering about the masia near Pals. If anything does happen, the people who tell you have already checked the images and called the police.

When nobody is there

Holiday homes, empty months and squatters on the Costa Brava

On the Costa Brava the empty months run longer than many owners admit. The house in Begur or Tossa gets Easter, a couple of weekends in June and the summer, and then waits until the following spring. In Empuriabrava whole stretches of canal have their boats covered and their shutters down through the winter, and in the villages inland the masia’s nearest neighbour may be in Barcelona as well. That is the risk: a door forced in L’Escala in December can go unseen until someone drives past at Easter, and by then a squatter can have been living there for months.

A monitored alarm changes that, because the police hear about it while the break-in is still under way, when they can still step in. Once squatters have moved into a villa in Roses, it usually takes a court order and months of waiting to get the house back. Give one tag to the neighbour in the urbanisation who keeps an eye on the house, another to the person who airs the masia and opens it up before you arrive, and the app shows you when they come and go. The deterrent sign at the gate in Calonge is the first thing anyone trying their luck will see.