Spanish National Police issue these essential tips to avoid summer holiday burglaries

house spain summer holiday burglary

Police issue top tips to avoid summer holiday burglaries in SpainCredit: Pavel Lysenko/Shutterstock.com

Spain’s National Police have provided advice on how to prevent home burglaries in the run-up to the summer holidays.

According to Spain’s National Police, the summer holiday periods, as well as weekends, tend to be the most favourable times criminals commit burglaries, taking advantage of homeowners absences as well as those of neighbouring properties, as reported by Spain’s National Police.

During the summer holiday period, the police intensify their prevention measures and have issued their top tips to help prevent burglaries.

According to the police these are a set of basic guidelines, simple to adopt, to be passed on to the people around us, adults and children, to familiarise them with the prevention culture in the face of this type of crime.

The top tips for avoiding summer holiday burglaries, as stated by the Spanish National Police, are as follows:

  • Always lock your door: 

When we go on holiday and whenever we leave the house, even if it is only for a few minutes, we should operate the lock on the door of the house with all the turns of the key to prevent access by means of the well-known sliding method, which consists of inserting a piece of plastic between the door frame and the locking slide.

We must also remember to lock all doors in the case of single-family homes, such as those leading to basements, garages or gardens, as well as windows.

  • Watch out for plastic strips:

If you notice plastic or glue strips between the front door and the door frame, this is a method often used by burglars to mark houses and check whether they are temporarily uninhabited.

If you see this type of strip or other suspicious marks, call 091 immediately.

  • Be careful when announcing that you are going on holiday:

We should be cautious when telling people around us that we are going on holiday when we are in a public place, as we do not know who might be listening and, of course, we should not tell strangers about our plans.

Nor is it advisable to talk about it on our social networks, especially if we have mentioned our place of residence in photographs in which our home appears or its location has been reflected when using sports applications in which we mark our route.

  • Making your home look lived in:

There are a series of measures that we can take to ensure that criminals do not see from the outside that we are absent from our home:

– You should not keep the blinds of your home closed, from the outside this can attract the attention of criminals who specialise in this type of burglary.

– You can take advantage of automated systems that exist on the market so that certain lights or electronic devices in your home are activated periodically.

– A trusted family member or relative can periodically collect the mail from the mailbox so that it does not accumulate and check the condition of the property.

  • Beware of the presence of strangers on the property:

Whether you live in a building, a housing estate or a single-family home, you should be aware of people who are not in the vicinity.

– Do not open the door to strangers, before opening the access door to the building, make sure that you know the person, facilitating access to strangers can compromise our security and that of our neighbours.

– In the presence of suspicious persons in the building or in the urbanisation, do not hesitate to call 091, it will never be a nuisance to approach and make the appropriate checks.

– In the event of hearing unusual noises at the entrance to a nearby house, especially if you know that the residents are on holiday, a call to 091 will cause a National Police patrol to immediately approach the place and check whether an attempt is being made to commit a burglary.

  • Do not enter, do not touch and call 091:

In the event that, despite everything, on returning from holiday, the door to the home is found to be open or forced, at no time should you enter or tamper with anything and you should immediately call 091 so that they can send a patrol car to carry out the appropriate checks.

To facilitate a possible investigation and the recovery of stolen objects, it is a good idea to have a list drawn up beforehand of the electronic objects you have at home -tablets, televisions, computers, consoles, etc- and their corresponding serial numbers.

It is also a good idea to have a detailed list and photographs of your jewellery and valuables. In the event of a theft, it is vitally important to provide these lists when filing a report at the police station so that the objects can be traced.

  • The access door is just as important as the lock:

For the security of your home, it is not only the type of door that you have that is important, but also the type of lock that you have installed on it, installing certified quality products.

There are locks on the market known as anti-bumping or anti-imprinting locks that make it difficult for criminals who use these techniques to steal to gain access to our homes.

Bumping is a technique used by some criminals, which consists of introducing a specially modified key into the lock, with which, after a series of blows to the lock, they manage to move the position of the bolts inside the lock, allowing them to open the door.

The imprinting technique aims to copy the user’s key by inserting thin foils into the lock to engrave the markings of the original key and subsequently obtain a copy.

Spain’s National Police issuing top tips for avoiding house burglaries during the summer holidays follows the Spanish traffic authorities revealing special plans to prevent travel chaos this summer.


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Written by

Joshua Manning

Originally from the UK, Joshua is based on the Costa Blanca and is a web reporter for the Euro Weekly News covering international and Spanish national news. Got a news story you want to share? Then get in touch at editorial@euroweeklynews.com.

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