Christian [email protected] Nov 21, 2011:

13 and then, there are buildings in the US without a 13th floor, going directly from 12th to 14th... Superstition...

Lauren DeAre (asker) Nov 20, 2011:

Madrid Thanks so much for working on this with me- the property is in Madrid and is a commercial property. I understand the reasoning behind including a "garden level" and a "ground level" and "first floor" separately, but I have never heard of garden level used for a commercial property in the US- only for apartments that are usually partially underground.

Charles Davis Nov 20, 2011:

@Lorena Interesting document! However: (a) Is there any reason to believe that the building in the ST is an old apartment block in Barcelona? (b) There's no sign of a "planta jardín" in this document or an "entresuelo" or "principal" in the ST. (c) The English equivalents in this glossary appear to me to be British rather than American. The "primera planta", in this example, is the real third floor in British terms but the real fourth floor in American terms (planta baja = first; entresuelo = second; principal = third; primera = fourth in US terms).

lorenab23 Nov 20, 2011:

@ Charles and Lauren here I attach a link with a nice Spanish-English glossary that explains what I am talking about:
Note. Some flats or apartments have strange numbering systems due to old tax systems on the number of floors in an apartment building. That is why in older buildings the "real" first floor is called Principal, the second floor is called Entresuelo (between floors) and the "real" third floor is called the first floor.
Planta baja = ground floor or street level
Entresuelo = mezzanine or “between floors”
Principal or pral = principal
Primera planta = first floor
http://www.ficasso.com/glossary_word_list_accommodation_barc...

Charles Davis Nov 20, 2011:

Hi, Lorena I don't say that couldn't be the case here. If the Spanish floor numbering has been arbitrarily manipulated like that, it may be desirable to maintain the fiction in the English translation and use no number higher than "third". So "primera" will be "first".

However, I have to say this seems to me unlikely. I have never encountered a building in Spain in which the "planta baja" was not the entrance level from the street. The "planta jardín" would be below this because there is a "garden" behind the building below street level. I have seen this quite often; I recently stayed at a hotel with the lobby on the "planta baja" (level 0) and a large open area with various facilities at level -1, which we would often call "lower ground floor" in the UK. Then at level -2 was the car park: this would be the "sótano". The "suelo ocupado por la edificación" is not a floor as such at all; it just means the plot of land on which the building stands.

The next floor above ground level, the "primera", is normally called the first floor in Britain and the second floor in the US, isn't it? Because the ground floor and the first floor are normally the same thing in the US.

lorenab23 Nov 20, 2011:

In certain areas of Spain they have some laws as to how many "floors" a building can have. To get around that the builders started adding all these extra names such as planta jardin, planta baja, so that the "planta primera" is sometimes even the 4th floor. That's what they did with my grandmother's building. If a may suggest I would try to keep the same concept in English...such as planta jardin = garden level, planta baja = main level, so that you end up with planta primera as first floor, in my humble opinion...