Every quarter, Spain’s Interior Ministry publishes the crimes recorded in every municipality of more than 20,000 people. Benidorm is one of them. The figures are dry, but they answer a question people ask a locksmith all the time: how worried should I be about my door?
The figures
Benidorm, January to June, as published in the ministry’s crime balance for the second quarter of 2025 (figures still pending final consolidation):
| Recorded in Benidorm | Jan–Jun 2024 | Jan–Jun 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Burglaries of homes | 49 | 32 |
| Burglaries of homes, shops and other premises | 80 | 68 |
| Thefts | 885 | 811 |
What they say
Burglaries of homes are few, and falling. Thirty-two in six months, in a city with more than 77,000 registered residents and several times that number of people in summer. That is not zero, and for the 32 households it was no comfort, but it is a small number.
Thefts are the common crime. Bags, wallets, phones: 811 in six months, twenty-five times the number of home burglaries. And many of those bags had keys in them.
What that means for your door
Your keys are more at risk than your lock. The most useful habits are about the key ring, not the cylinder:
- Keep keys apart from anything that shows the address: ID, letters, a hotel card, the booking printout.
- Never put an address tag or flat number on a key ring.
- If keys go with a stolen bag and anything in it could lead to your door, change the cylinder.
A sensible lock is enough for most homes. A good anti-snap cylinder and a door that closes properly into a solid frame deal with the common methods of forced entry. You do not need to turn a holiday flat into a vault.
Empty homes deserve a little more. A flat left closed for months is a better target than one lived in. An additional lock, a door that is locked with the key rather than just pulled shut, and a balcony door that genuinely locks make a difference.
Reading any figures carefully
These are recorded crimes: incidents reported to the police. Not every theft is reported, and a half-year figure moves around. The trend is more useful than any single number. And none of it predicts what happens on your street: it just helps decide where the effort is worth putting.
Where the effort goes on the door itself, lock changes and repairs covers the cylinders and what they resist.