Land Registries & Cadastres

In your country, the Land Registry and the Cadaster are they different institutions?

a) Which are the main duties of the respective organizations?

Land Registry:

– To register rights in rem with the effect of creating or assigning indefeasible entitlements. It means that the registered owner will be protected without needing a court ruling or an acquisitive prescription, unless he knew his acquisition was invalid for any reason. What registered in the registry is presumed to be true and its falseness can only be proved in a judgment in which the ones who can have any rights affected according to the Land registry have been part. And even in the event that the fake of the Registry has been proved the ones that have trust on it will not be affected, because the land registry association is responsible of all errors and will compensate the real owner.

– To provide accurate and reliable information about property rights, its entitlement, extension and charges.

– In a second role, as by-products, to prepare statistics, to strengthen the full realization and enforcement of the law (enforce urban, social housing and financial policies, monitoring the compliance of sectorial legislation requirements) and to provide crucial information to public administrations (it is, being a powerful tool to develop land policies).

Cadastre:

The Cadastre is an administrative register that impacts on the government-citizen relationship. Registration in the Cadastre is mandatory. It’s used for the valuation of property for tax purposes. It offers a continuous homogeneous GIS for the complete territory and open and free access to its information.

b) Which Ministry’s competence do they fall under?

Land Registry—Ministry of Justice

Cadastre—Ministry of Finance

c) Could you describe in brief the form of collaboration between the two institutions?

Notaries and Registrars are obliged to submit information related to real estate transfers to the Cadastre.

Reforms introduced legally in 2015 established that the description of properties in the Property Rights Registry is to be done by a georeferenced graphical representation.

The graphic geo-referenced description of the Property Rights Registry is based on the cadastral cartography.

• Once the cadastral data have been incorporated in the real estate information in the Property Rights Registry, the delimitation, location and area data are considered to be true. The Property Rights Registry`s record will also indicate if the real estate is coordinated with the Cadastre and the date of coordination.

• In case of disagreement, citizens can provide an “alternative georeferenced representation” that is then used to update the Cadastre after to pass the appropriate graphical and technical validations.