Community of Owners passes rule that President must know Spanish
The Diversity and Coexistence society is calling for the rule to be made law nationwide
A community of owners in Málaga has written into its bylaws that the Community President must be able to speak and write Spanish in order to hold a position as the head of the comunidad.
In Spain, a ‘comunidad de propietarios’ is an elected or assigned board that oversees the management and finances of an urbanisation gated complex or apartment building, and so almost all Spanish homes have one.
For communities that are made up of majority expatriates, it is useful to have an English-speaking community president, but as we are in Spain there are also certain processes and legal requirements that make it convenient for the president to understand Spanish too.
The Torres de San Andrés community in Málaga recently adopted such a requirement after a unanimous by the owners at their annual meeting.
In addition, they have ruled that the costs of any interpreters or translation into other languages apart from Spanish must be borne by the residents who request them.
According to José Antonio Sierra, spokesperson and founder of the association Diversidad y Convivencia and ex-director of the Cervantes Institute in Dublin (Ireland), the aim of this agreement is to avoid what happens in some communities of owners, where an interpreter not recognised by Article 3 of the Spanish Constitution is needed to communicate with the president of the community.
Article 3 of the Spanish constitution states, “Castilian Spanish is the official Spanish language of the State. All Spaniards have the duty to know it and the right to use it. The other Spanish languages shall also be official in the respective Autonomous Communities in accordance with their Statutes.”
The association Diversidad y Convivencia, created in 2004 in Málaga for the dissemination in Andalusia of all the languages of Spain recognised by the Constitution, has asked the political parties represented in the Parliament and Senate to reform the Horizontal Property Law to make it obligatory nationwide that, “In order to be President of the Community, it will be compulsory to know Spanish and the co-official language in those Autonomous Communities that have it in their Statutes of Autonomy.”
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