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Opening License for Your Bar Restaurant

You Must Have an Opening License for Your Bar Restaurant

When you buy a bar or restaurant, it must have a valid current Opening license (Licescia de Apetura), if it doesn’t have this then it is not a legally established business and you will not be allowed to open for trading.

When a business is not properly licensed for the exact commercial activity in which it is engaged, it has no value and can be shut down following an inspection at any time.

There are plenty of people trying to sell businesses, which don’t have a license, so please be very careful to inspect the opening license before you negotiate to buy the business.

When you find a bar that you like you must ask to see both the Opening License and the Fiscal License.

Make sure that the license is recently issued. A business with a recently issued Opening License will have been inspected in great detail before the Commercial Dept issued the license.

During this inspection the department would have checked that every aspect of the fabric of the business meets the new EU Health and Safety standards.

All the main installations are checked, and technical drawings signed off by the College of Architects in Malaga must be provided. In addition to the technical drawings you are required to provide a (Boletin) which is a certificate guaranteeing the standard of workmanship. The Boletin can only be issued by a fully qualified tradesman (so an owner who has done say the plumbing himself, will not be able to get a Boletin to show that the work has been conducted to the high standard which are now expected), and Boletins are required for th :

• Plumbing
• Electrical
• Gas installations
• Extraction system
• Also the premises must have disabled access and disabled toilet facilities

Correct layout of the kitchen and the condition of ALL kitchen equipment is checked. The physical layout of the working areas and public areas plus emergency lighting, fire extinguishers and fire exits are also checked against the latest EU standards.

An Opening License can be granted on one of three levels:

• Bar
• Cafeteria
• Restaurant

If you buy a business without the appropriate and recently issued license, you could be looking at completely rebuilding the interior of the premises. You could also have to wait up to 18 months for the license to be issued and you are allowed to open for trading.

Well all this sounds dreadful, doesn’t it? So what’s the way round getting involved in all this?

Simple! Buy a bar, cafeteria or restaurant like mine, which has had all this work done and has a new opening license for a Restaurant, which is ready to transfer to the new owner and this is a quick and simple process.

I hope that this post has been useful to you.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 at 2:25 pm and is filed under Business. Find similar posts by selecting and of the following tags: bar, license, spain. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.