Five years ago, in Playas del Coco, a couple was living in the house they had built on family land. He is Costa Rican; she is American, married to him and settled in Guanacaste. The land had never, not for a single day, carried a registered title at the National Registry — and yet the family had occupied it, in one form or another, for more than four decades.
The land had come to our clients through a gift. His maternal grandmother had possessed it for more than thirty years without ever registering it — many properties in Guanacaste, especially those going back a generation or more, simply never went through that process. In 2014, by then elderly, she decided to give the land to her grandson and his wife through a notarial deed. But a gift cannot create a registered title that never existed: what the deed transferred was possession and the right to possess, not a registry entry — because that entry simply was not there to transfer.
Since then, the couple had kept that possession open, peaceful and uninterrupted: they kept the land properly fenced off from each of its neighbors, had built and lived in their house on it, and never once had anyone dispute their right to it. Without a registered title, though, they could not mortgage the land, sell it with full legal certainty, or leave it clearly settled for their own heirs down the road.
Adding the grandmother’s possession to her grandchildren’s, this family had been on that land for more than forty years — and until then, not one day of it appeared in the National Registry.
What the law says, and what we did
A possessor of real property lacking a registered or registrable title at the Public Registry may request that one be granted… by proving possession for more than ten years
Possessory Information Law, Article 1
That law exists precisely for cases like this one: land held in good faith, continuously, openly and peacefully, for years, that never ended up with a registrable title. Article 863 of the Civil Code also allows a possessor to add a predecessor’s possession time to their own — in this case, the more than thirty years the grandmother held the land before gifting it were added to the couple’s own ten-plus years of possession, comfortably clearing the term the law requires.
We filed the possessory-information proceeding before the Civil Court of Santa Cruz, together with the evidence the law requires: the property’s surveyed plan, the donation deeds, the couple’s marriage certificate (needed because, since they are married, the property was regularized as a single registry unit rather than two separate shares), the municipal property declaration, photographs showing the land’s boundaries, and letters of consent from the neighboring landowners.
The court notified each neighboring landowner, carried out an on-site inspection and confirmed what we already knew: that the land was properly bounded and in continuous use, with no one opposing the claim.
On the strength of that evidence, it issued a ruling ordering the property to be registered in the couple’s name at the National Registry, free of any mortgage liens.
For the first time in this family’s history, the land was registered at the National Registry in the name of its true owners.
Why we’re telling this story
This kind of situation is more common than it seems in Guanacaste: land passed down within the same family for generations, held in good faith for decades, but never formally registered — sometimes because the process was different back then, sometimes because there was never any urgency, until the lack of a title starts to genuinely limit what can be done with the property.
Not having a registered title does not mean you have no rights over land you have possessed in good faith for years — but it does mean that, until that situation is regularized, the property stays exposed: it cannot be mortgaged, it is harder to sell with confidence, and it can complicate passing those assets on to the next generation. Today, five years after that ruling, this family’s property has the legal certainty it never had before.
At Libre Verdad, we support families — many with a foreign spouse — through the entire possessory-information process: from assessing whether their possession meets the law’s requirements, to gathering the necessary evidence and representing them before the court. If you live on land your family has held for years but never registered, we are glad to review your case. Contact us by DM.
Confidentiality Notice: This story is based on a real case handled by Libre Verdad. To protect the privacy of those involved and comply with our professional duty of confidentiality, the names, certain facts, and some identifying details have been changed. Any resemblance to identifiable individuals is solely for illustrative purposes.
Related reading:
- The 600 Square Meters That “Disappeared”: A Real Boundary Dispute in Guanacaste
- Breach of Contract in Costa Rica: He Paid $25,000 for Land That Could Never Be His
Información general, no constituye asesoría legal. / General information, not legal advice.
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