If the coronavirus crisis left you unable to pay rent, or unable to go through with buying a house you had already put a deposit on, you are not automatically stuck with the consequences. Spanish law has a way out for situations exactly like this.
Many contracts signed before the pandemic, especially property purchases and deposit agreements, ended up in a difficult spot once the crisis hit. The general rule in contract law is "pacta sunt servanda": contracts must be honored. Normally, if you fail to meet your side of a deal, you are liable and may have to pay compensation or a penalty to the other party.
But the Spanish Civil Code carves out an exception. If you fail to comply because of something unforeseeable or unavoidable, you are not held liable. This is what is commonly called force majeure or fortuitous event. If you could not have predicted the problem, or you saw it coming but genuinely could not have prevented it, you should not be penalized or forced to pay compensation, unless the contract itself already accounted for that risk. Every case has to be looked at individually.
The coronavirus pandemic, and the public health measures that came with it, fall into this category of force majeure. Many people saw their income drop because of an ERTE (a temporary layoff or reduced-hours scheme) or because they lost their job altogether, which could easily have derailed plans to buy a home that were made before anyone knew the crisis was coming.
For the party who could not fulfil their obligations to walk away without being penalized, meaning a buyer does not lose their deposit, or a seller does not have to pay back double, the disrupting event (the pandemic, in this case) needs to have been unpredictable at the time the contract was signed. Every contract also carries an implicit safeguard known as the "rebus sic stantibus" clause, which has developed over time through court rulings.
What does this "rebus" clause actually mean? It means that a completely unpredictable change in circumstances can allow a contract to be modified or ended. To use it, the same core requirement applies as with force majeure: the change had to be genuinely unforeseeable. The effect has to match the situation. As Spain's Supreme Court has put it, the point is to "relax" the rule that contracts must be fulfilled, not necessarily to cancel them outright.
So in most cases, invoking this clause means adjusting the contract to rebalance what each side owes the other, rather than wiping it out completely. Only when fulfilling the contract has become truly impossible should it be cancelled outright, with no compensation owed by either side.
What this means for you
Not every hardship counts the same. Someone who lost their job entirely, with no clear timeline for when their finances will recover, is in a different position than someone on a temporary ERTE who expects to return to their old job and income once things return to normal. The specifics of your situation determine which outcome applies.
