Zone guide · Jávea (Xàbia)
Buying Property in Duanes de la Mar
Duanes de la Mar is the part of Javea that still works for a living: a fishing harbour, a line of rice restaurants, townhouses and apartments with year-round neighbours. Legally, that means the Costas line on the frontline strips, a proposed 12 percent cap on holiday lets, and older buildings whose paperwork needs reading before you sign anything.
4.9 from 104 Google reviews · Juan Bertomeu, abogado ICALI 4643 · Daniel Bertomeu, tax adviser (AEDAF 06838) · Legal position last reviewed July 2026
Stand on the harbour wall at Duanes de la Mar on a weekday afternoon and you can watch the boats land the catch that the restaurants along the front will argue over by evening. The port quarter is not a postcard of a fishing village. It is a fishing village, still working, with the best arròs a banda in town cooked a hundred metres from where the fish came ashore.
That is what pulls buyers down here. Not the villa dream on a hillside but a townhouse or an apartment in a quarter where the bakery opens in January, where you hear more Valencian than anywhere else near the sea, and where a whole week happens on foot. The trade is that the buildings are older, the frontline strips are watched by the State, and the holiday-let rules have just been redrawn.
So, a word on who you would be dealing with. Javea sits right between our two offices, Moraira on one side and Denia on the other, and we are in town every week, at the notary, the town hall and the property, with well over 100 completed purchases in Javea over the years. Juan Antonio Bertomeu Vallés, abogado, ICALI 4643, has been the lawyer on those files since 1991; Daniel Bertomeu, the tax adviser of the firm, AEDAF 06838, looks after what comes every year afterwards.
Who buys in Duanes de la Mar
The port and the old town are the two corners of Javea that never stopped being Spanish, and some foreign buyers choose Duanes for exactly that reason. The hillside urbanisations are where the British, German, Dutch and Nordic communities cluster; down here the neighbours are more often Spanish and Valencian families who have always lived by the harbour. The buyers we meet in Duanes de la Mar tend to be British and Dutch couples who want the year-round version of the town rather than the gated one. We also see Belgians who tried the campo and missed walking to dinner, and now and then a Nordic remote worker after an apartment near La Grava. The British remain the largest foreign group in town, around 6,000 people, the biggest British colony in the Comunitat Valenciana, and a quiet slice of them end up by the port on purpose.
What we actually check in Duanes de la Mar
La Grava and Triana sit on the State's line
The beach strips either side of the harbour are frontline in the strict legal sense. Under the Ley de Costas the coastal protection strip runs 100 metres inland as a general rule, and 20 metres where the land was already urban in 1988, and where the official deslinde line falls decides what can ever be done with a frontline property. Two near-identical houses a street apart can sit on opposite sides of it, so we check the deslinde position before any deposit leaves your account.
An apartment here answers to its neighbours
Much of the stock near the harbour is flats, and since 3 April 2025 a new tourist let in a block needs the express prior approval of the community of owners by a three fifths majority, under Ley Orgánica 1/2025 reforming article 17.12 of the Ley de Propiedad Horizontal. If any part of your plan involves letting, the building's statutes and the minutes of its meetings get read before you sign the arras contract, not after. Port buildings have opinions.
Townhouses that grew for fifty years
Families extended these houses floor by floor as they needed the space, and not all of it ever reached the title. The habitability paper, the segunda ocupación, works as a declaración responsable under Decreto 12/2021, valid ten years and renewed when the property changes hands or a new utility contract is signed, and without it the water and electricity cannot follow you. We pull the nota simple from the right Registry, two serve Javea, both on Calle Historiador Chabás, and read the built reality against it before you commit.
Holiday lets after 28 May 2026
The port under the 28 May 2026 caps
On 28 May 2026 the town hall gave initial approval to modificación puntual número 41 of the PGOU, setting a saturation cap for every zone in town. The port zone got 12 percent, tighter than the interior zones at 15, nowhere near El Tosalet's 25, though looser than the old town's 6. The same session suspended new tourist licences for apartments for one year, and that lands hardest exactly here, where so much of the stock is flats; single-family homes keep the clearer route, always subject to the cap. Now, the honest caveat. All of this is initial approval, pending final approval and publication in the BOP of Alicante, so the detail can still move. If letting matters to your numbers, we check the live position for the exact address before you commit.
Tourist rental licences in Jávea: the current rules and our fixed feeOwning in Duanes de la Mar, the tax side
Ownership here comes with a local peculiarity. Javea collects its own taxes through Xabia Tributa, the town's own office, rather than SUMA like Denia or Teulada next door, so your IBI, 0.85 percent of the valor catastral under the 2023 ordinance with a small cut approved for 2025, and the waste charge billed since August 2025 both arrive from there. None of that touches the national side: as a non-resident owner you file Modelo 210 with the AEAT every year even if the flat just sits there, and because Javea's general catastral revision is an old one the imputed band is usually 2 percent, which we confirm against your receipt rather than assume.
Modelo 210 in Jávea: what non-resident owners file, and our feeDuanes de la Mar: questions buyers actually ask
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