Ask a Spanish care home whether it has a personalised care plan for your relative and the answer is almost certainly yes. Ask whether that plan means they choose their own bedtime and, according to new figures, there’s a good chance it doesn’t. 

Nine in 10 care homes say they have a personal plan

Spain has published its second full count of residential care centres, and for the first time it used the same standard everywhere rather than letting each region measure things its own way. The Ministry of Social Rights, Consumo y Agenda 2030 (Spain’s social affairs ministry), through Imserso (the Institute for the Elderly and Social Services), counted 7,893 centres between homes for older people and homes for people with disabilities, and asked every one of them how they run day to day.

Nine in 10 said they had a personalised care plan for each resident. On paper, that sounds like exactly the individual attention families hope for when they choose a home. In practice, according to the same figures, it doesn’t always stretch as far as when someone goes to bed. 

Just under half let residents choose their bedtime

Only 46.9 per cent of centres said residents could decide for themselves when to go to bed and get up. In the rest, that call is made for the whole home rather than left to the individual, whatever their own habits might be.

It’s an easy detail to overlook when weighing up a care home, where the assumption is usually ‘of course you’d still get to live by your own routine, just with more support around you’. These figures suggest that isn’t always the case, and the gap between having a written plan and actually letting someone choose their own hours is exactly where families’ expectations and reality can part ways. 

It’s worth being clear what the census measures, too. The figures come from centres describing their own policies, not from residents describing what their days are really like, so a home that ticks the box for flexibility on paper could still fall short of it in practice. Officials have also said this second count isn’t directly comparable with the first from 2024, since both the methodology and the centres included have changed.

Restraints, pets and shared rooms tell a similar story

The rest of the census paints a similar picture of a sector still working towards full personal choice rather than delivering it everywhere. Three in four centres say they have a plan to phase out physical or mechanical restraints, and just over half allow residents to keep a pet, though that figure drops sharply in publicly run centres compared with private ones.

Fewer than half of residents have a room to themselves, with shared bedrooms still the norm across both elderly and disability centres. Ownership matters too, with nearly two in three elderly residences privately owned and run, and the rest split between public ownership and centres that are publicly owned but privately managed. 

The census follows a bigger shift in how Spain cares for elderly people 

This count lands only a week after Congress approved Spain’s biggest overhaul of dependency and disability law in 20 years, a reform aimed squarely at people cared for at home rather than in residential settings. That law lets home carers accompany someone to appointments, combines previously separate services and allows friends or neighbours to be paid as informal carers, but it says nothing about what happens once someone actually moves into a home.

Rosa Martínez, Spain’s Secretary of State for Social Rights, said the point of the census wasn’t to grade individual homes but to finally see the sector clearly. “You cannot transform what you do not know,” she said, arguing that a shared national standard was overdue after years of each region measuring what it could, however it could.

What to ask before choosing a home

There’s no way to check a specific home’s real routine from a national spreadsheet, so the most reliable option is still to ask directly, and specifically, rather than accepting a general reassurance about “personalised care”.

The questions that are most important to ask before signing anything:

• Do residents choose their own bedtime and wake-up time, or does the home run one fixed schedule for everyone?
• Does that answer change for residents who need more support, or who share a room?
• How often and when are visits allowed, and does that change at short notice? 
• Can residents keep their own belongings, furniture or a pet in their room?
• How is a personalised care plan actually put into daily practice, rather than just written down?

A written care plan is a start, not proof, so the safest way to know how a home really runs is still to ask before signing anything, not after a relative has already moved in.

See also: Families caring for elderly parents in Spain say Brexit has left them with impossible choices and Understanding live-in home care, for families weighing up alternatives to residential care.

A single mother in Benalmadena and homeowner says she is facing homelessness after she rented out her apartment temporarily and the occupants promptly ceased paying rent. The legal eviction of tenants, who it is said have not paid rent for nine months, was postponed by the courts at the last minute.

Named only A for privacy reasons, a foreign resident and single mother, says she had expected to return to her Torrequebrada apartment on Thursday, September 24, after a court had scheduled the eviction process of the occupants for 10.30am. Instead, she says the proceedings were postponed after the defendants claimed just two days before the hearing that they did not have legal representation.

She says she now has no idea where she and her child will live, while her child has been unable to start school as planned.

Nine months without rent in Benalmadena

According to A, the tenants moved into the Benalmadena property in September 2025 and haven’t paid rent since December. She told EWN they sent an official letter in March asking her to stop “bothering them” to ask for the unpaid rent.

She believes the temporary tenants understood the legal process from the start. Months of legal proceedings followed, with A continuing to pay property-related bills for utilities used by the occupants while receiving no rental income from them whatsoever. That is her allegation, and the tenants’ account has not been provided to Euro Weekly News.

She says the financial pressure has also been increased by lawyer and other legal costs involved in trying to simply recover her own home.

Eviction delayed after legal representation claim

A court decree dated July 31, 2026 states that the defendants had been served and that an eviction had been scheduled for September 24. She says the occupants received the court order but waited until shortly before the deadline to raise their latest objection. She explains the occupants, business owners in Benalmadena, then claimed to be in a vulnerable economic situation and that the court now has to consider the new evidence. But, no one knows when that will be resolved. No new eviction date is known to A. Her life has been left dangling ever since.

Spain’s vulnerability rules

Spanish law currently allows certain vulnerable tenants facing eviction over unpaid rent to ask the court for an extraordinary suspension where they can demonstrate economic vulnerability and a lack of alternative housing.

Under Royal Decree-Law 2/2026, these measures apply until December 31, 2026, but the law also includes an important protection for landlords who own two or fewer homes. In such cases, the suspension described in the measure does not apply. The judge has to consider the new evidence and the relevant legal conditions before deciding whether a suspension is justified.

A says she is a single mother facing her own housing uncertainty. She had expected to move back into the apartment once the temporary tenants left. Her child has been staying in another house until now, but that arrangement is coming to an end.

‘I don’t know what to do with my life’ she says the dispute has gone far beyond the unpaid rent. “I don’t even know what to do with my life now, where I will be living or when and where my child will go to school,” she said.

She told Euro Weekly News that she had trusted the Spanish family who rented her apartment and believed they were honest tenants. She is not asking for the court to be bypassed. She wants attention drawn to her position as a homeowner who says she has followed the legal process while going without rental income for nine months. “I am talking about what happens to an ordinary mother and child when a property dispute leaves a family without a home, without school arrangements and under severe financial pressure — despite having gone through the legal process.”

The case is now waiting to be dealt with by the courts, which is considering the occupants’ claim and new, last-minute evidence.

Until the written decision is received, it is not known when proceedings will move forward or when A can return to her Benalmadena home.

Kefir has gone from something most people had barely heard of to a regular fixture in Spanish supermarket fridges. It is sold as a healthy fermented drink, often bought by people looking for an easy way to add beneficial bacteria and other microorganisms to their diet. But there is a rather awkward problem hiding behind the label.   A study by researchers at Spain’s Universitat Rovira i Virgili has found that you cannot reliably tell from the packaging whether the kefir you are buying contains yeast, one of the microorganisms traditionally found in kefir fermentation.

Researchers examined 170 kefir products sold in Spain and initially found that just 36 mentioned yeast on their labels.  After one manufacturer corrected an apparent labelling error affecting two products, that figure rose to 38. So, in a supermarket aisle packed with bottles proudly calling themselves kefir, the name alone may not tell you very much about what is actually inside.

What makes kefir kefir?

The distinction is important because traditional kefir is rather more complicated than ordinary yoghurt. Kefir is produced through fermentation involving a community of microorganisms. These include lactic-acid bacteria, acetic-acid bacteria and yeasts, which work together during the fermentation process. That mixture is part of what gives traditional kefir its particular characteristics.

The researchers compared Spanish supermarket products with the international Codex Alimentarius definition of kefir, which recognises the combination of bacteria and yeasts involved in its production. The problem is that European food labelling rules do not require manufacturers to list every microorganism present in a fermented product. That leaves shoppers with a surprisingly simple problem: the front of the bottle may say kefir, but the label may not tell them whether yeast is actually part of the fermentation.

Researchers checked 170 supermarket products

The study was carried out in August 2025 and looked at 170 products from 46 brands sold through national and regional supermarket chains covering around 60 per cent of the Spanish market. The researchers recorded information including the type of milk or other base used, whether the kefir was drinkable or spoonable, its price, whether it was organic and what manufacturers said about its microorganisms. Only 36 products, or 21.2 per cent, explicitly mentioned yeast.

The researchers later issued a correction after Danone informed them that two Activia kefir products did contain yeast, despite it not appearing on their packaging because of an error during the production of the labels. That brings the number to 38 products, or 22.35 per cent. The finding does not mean that the other 132 products were fake kefir or contained no yeast. The study was primarily an examination of product information and labelling, rather than a laboratory test proving the microbial composition of every bottle, that distinction is crucial.

Some kefir products were more transparent

The researchers found considerable differences depending on the type of product.Among cow’s milk kefirs, yeast was declared on 29.9 per cent of labels. None of the goat’s milk, sheep’s milk, mixed goat-and-sheep, plant-based or water kefirs in the sample declared yeast. Drinkable products were also more likely to mention it than spoonable kefirs. Yeast appeared on the labels of 35.7 per cent of drinkable products, compared with 13.1 per cent of spoonable versions. There were differences according to where the products were made, too. 

Yeast was declared by 14.7 per cent of nationally produced products, compared with 53.3 per cent of products whose origin was not Spanish. The figures produced another unexpected result when researchers looked at price. Among the cheapest products, 36.8 per cent declared yeast. That fell to 28.1 per cent in the middle price group and just one of the 56 products in the highest-price group. Organic kefir was even more striking. None of the 63 organic products examined declared yeast, compared with 35.5 per cent of conventional products.

What should Spanish shoppers make of it?

The study does not mean people should stop buying kefir, nor does it show that most supermarket kefir is somehow fraudulent. What it does show is that consumers cannot use the label alone to establish the microbial composition of many products sold as kefir. For people buying it specifically because they want traditionally fermented kefir, that lack of information is significant. The researchers argue that clearer labelling would give consumers a better understanding of what they are buying.

They also point to the lack of specific microbiological requirements for kefir under current European rules, compared with the international Codex standard. Kefir may have become a familiar sight in Spanish supermarket fridges, but the research suggests that the name on the bottle does not necessarily give shoppers the full story. And when the whole reason for buying a fermented food is what is happening inside it, that seems like a fairly important detail to leave off the label.