Cadastre and land register

Spain keeps two separate records of the same piece of land, and they say different things. El catastro describes the thing — where it is, how big it is, what it is used for — and serves the tax office; el registro de la propiedad describes the rights over it and protects whoever is entered there. That the two disagree is normal, not a scandal. Midway down the list sits a word English also has, in a place nobody would look for it. El gravamen is a charge on property: a mortgage, a right of way, anything a buyer takes on together with the land. English calls that « an encumbrance », and keeps « gravamen » for something else entirely — the gravamen of a complaint is its essence, the heart of what is being alleged, and it lives in courtrooms and leading articles, never on a title deed. The same Latin weight in both languages, one of them pressing on land and the other on an argument.