Does a pizza receipt prevent evicting squatters as Feijóo says?

Barcelona“There are owners who are afraid because, if a squatter enters their home, with a piece of paper proving they ordered a pizza, no one can kick them out for a few years.” The PP candidate for the general elections, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, said this on Wednesday at an event in Seville, in which he outlined his party's proposals on housing. According to the conservative leader, a person could prove their residence in a home with what has become popular as "the pizza method."

As explained by the real estate portal Idealista, this method consists of ordering a pizza to be delivered to the address of the home that one wants to occupy, waiting for the delivery person at the entrance, and picking up the order with the receipt. After 48 hours (the law is especially protective of squatters after this period), the squatters would enter the property and, if the alarm were triggered or the police arrived due to a notice from the owner or a neighbor, they would show the receipt to try to prove that they have already been there for two days and avoid being evicted immediately, since the case would go to the courts.

Lawyer specializing in civil and commercial procedural law Miquel Serra i Camús clarifies that the context in which an occupation occurs is decisive. The worst-case scenario for an owner arrives when it involves an empty property that is not their primary residence and does not have an alarm. In these cases, he explains, the agents can refer the matter to the judicial system. Serra i Camús acknowledges that one can try to justify residency with a pizza receipt, with fake rental contracts, or by bringing in furniture to give the appearance that they have been living there for a while. For this reason, he considers that presenting the pizza method as a formula that guarantees the avoidance of eviction "is a simplification": the situation depends on the circumstances of each case and the evidence available when the police intervene. In the event that there are attentive neighbors or the alarm sounds, it is more complicated for the squatters to justify themselves, even if they use different tricks.

In any case, what it does not guarantee them in any way is avoiding eviction in the medium or long term. ARA has located two judicial resolutions in which the presentation of a purchase receipt did not prevent a conviction for a minor crime of property usurpation. The most recent case is judgment 188/2026 from the Provincial Court of Lugo. According to the resolution, the police did not evict the two occupants because they considered that the occupation was not immediate, given that there was furniture in the property and the occupants had presented a receipt. The judgment does not specify what type of receipt it was. Finally, the Provincial Court of Lugo dismissed the defendants' appeals and confirmed the sentence of a three-month fine for each for a minor crime of usurpation.

Another precedent is judgment 340/2020 from the Provincial Court of Barcelona. In this case, the court expressly mentions the online purchase of a pizza sent to the same occupied home with the intention of creating "a sort of fictitious domicile". The resolution, which confirms the defendant's conviction to a three-month fine for usurpation, describes this "grotesque" practice as an example of the attempt to prove residence by means of a purchase receipt.

Exchange of reproaches between Sánchez and the PP

Ironizing about Feijóo's remarks has become a tradition for the Spanish Prime Minister. Pedro Sánchez returned to it this Wednesday, joking about the matter with a tweet in which he recovers an old message, published by himself in 2010. "Today, when there is so much talk about pizzas, I want to remember this memorable tweet...", wrote the socialist candidate for the presidency hours after Núñez Feijóo's statements. The tweet in question said: "With my colleagues at the Luna Rosa restaurant, eating a damn good pizza".

Minutes later, the official PP account on X responded to Sánchez's tweet with a reference to the sauna that the president's father-in-law, Sabiniano Gómez, allegedly managed in the early 2000s. "No wonder you like it. You ended up marrying the accountant of a "business" that was nearby," they wrote, and attached a map showing the distance between the pizzeria and Sánchez's father-in-law's sauna.

The mayor of Badalona and PP candidate in Catalonia, Xavier García Albiol, has also decided to enter the debate. He, appointed by Feijóo as the future rapporteur of the anti-squatting law, recorded a video near a building where some squatters tried to use the pizza method. Although his intention was to defend Feijóo, Albiol himself confirmed that, thanks to the fact that the neighbors were diligent in reporting the squatting, the pizza receipt was of no use to the squatters and the police evicted them.