Who you are calling

What this is

Locksmith Elche is a mobile locksmith service. We come to the property; there is nowhere to visit. That is a deliberate shape rather than a missing shopfront — the work is at your door, and a premises in one part of the city would only make us slower to the rest of it.

The phone is answered by someone who does the work, in English or Spanish. If you get a price it is because somebody has understood the problem, not because a script produced a number.

The jobs we turn down

This is the part most locksmith websites leave vague, so here it is plainly. We do not cut, copy, duplicate, supply or program keys of any kind. That includes house keys, car keys, transponder keys, fobs and remote controls. We do not repair or replace ignition barrels, and we do not do motorbike keys.

On vehicles we provide one thing: opening a car or van when the keys are shut inside. If your key is lost, broken or not working, we are not the people to ring, and we would rather tell you that in thirty seconds on the phone than take a call-out fee to arrive and say it at your kerbside.

We also will not set up systems where one key opens several doors, because that means issuing and controlling keys, and supplying keys is not something we do at all.

What we do instead

Open locks, change them, repair them, and make doors secure again after somebody has had a go at them. Domestic, commercial, coastal second homes and the units on the estates. There is a page for each.

How we quote

An indicative range on the phone, because the type of door and whether it is deadlocked genuinely change the answer. Then a fixed price once we can see it, before anything starts. If the job turns out to be different from what it looked like, we stop and say so rather than carrying on and explaining afterwards.

Night, weekend and public-holiday work carries a higher rate. You hear that figure before anyone sets off, and if the problem can wait until morning we will tell you, even though it costs us the job.

The bits people find out later

• We have to establish you are entitled to be inside before opening any door. DNI or NIE with the address, a rental contract, the escritura, or a recent bill in your name.
• You get a Spanish factura, itemised. It is what an insurer will ask for, and a vague invoice is one of the commonest reasons a simple claim turns into correspondence.
• Emergency work happens at any hour. Planned work is booked into normal hours, where the right parts are on the van and you are not paying a night rate unnecessarily.

Why the pomegranate

The Granada Mollar de Elche is the only pomegranate in Spain with a Protected Designation of Origin, and this corner of Alicante grows more than three quarters of the country's crop. Cut one across and you get chambers of seed divided by pale membrane, which is very close to what a lock cylinder looks like in section. It seemed a better mark for a locksmith in this city than another padlock.