The Palmeral is not a park with a fence around it. It is a working structure of irrigation channels dividing the ground into rectangular orchards, each bounded by palms and, very often, by a wall with a gate in it. Those walls run through the middle of the city, and a surprising number of properties in Centro–La Vila and the old Horts i Molins area have one of those gates as an access they use weekly and think about never.
Gate locks are a category of their own, and they fail in ways front doors do not.
Why they go
They are outdoors, completely. No porch, no overhang, no door frame protecting them. Rain goes in the keyway. So does everything else.
They are next to water. The acequias that define the orchard grid are irrigation channels. Air around them is damp in a way the street twenty metres away is not.
They move. A metal gate in an Elche summer, where the hottest days go past 35 °C, expands. A gate that sits correctly in January will bind in August, and the lock takes the load every time somebody shoves it.
Nobody maintains them. A front door gets attention because it is the front door. A gate into an orchard gets attention the day it does not open.
The failure pattern
Almost always the same: the gate drops or the post shifts, the bolt stops meeting the keep squarely, and for a season or two people lift the gate slightly as they turn the key. Then the key snaps, or the mechanism gives up, and the assumption is that the lock failed. The lock did not fail. It was being used as a lever.
What to do about it
Check the alignment before you blame the lock. If you are lifting, pushing or pulling the gate to make the key turn, the fix is at the hinges and the keep, not in the cylinder — and replacing the cylinder without correcting it buys you a year at most.
Use a dry lubricant, not oil. Outdoors, oil collects dust and turns into grinding paste, and beside an irrigation channel it collects rather more than dust.
And treat the gate as part of the property’s security rather than as garden furniture. A wall with an unsecured gate in it is a wall with a door in it. In a city where a great many houses back onto orchards that are quiet at night, that is worth an afternoon’s thought.
Worth keeping in proportion
None of this is dramatic. Gate locks are cheap, the work is quick, and the entire problem is that nobody looks at them until the moment they need them. Once a year, turn the key both ways and see whether it feels like it did last time. That is the whole maintenance regime.
If this is where you have got to, the page you want next is a new cylinder.