It is in the wardrobe, it is about the size of a shoebox, and it has been shut since an owner two sales ago set a four-digit code and did not write it down.
This is one of the most common safe jobs on the Elche coast, and in Gran Alacant across the boundary in Santa Pola — where roughly ten thousand residents, the large majority foreign and mostly British, make up a third of that municipality, and where an enormous share of the housing has changed hands at least once since it was built.
Try the free things first
The batteries. If the keypad is dead, that is the whole problem more often than not. Many of these safes have an external battery compartment under the keypad or a socket on the front for a 9V. Replace them before doing anything else. It costs three euros.
The default code. A remarkable number of these were never changed from the manufacturer’s factory setting, which is usually in the manual and frequently on the internet. Worth two minutes.
The override key. Cheap safes ship with a small emergency key, often behind a cover on the keypad. Owners put it somewhere sensible and then sell the flat. Check the kitchen drawer, the top of the wardrobe and the folder of appliance manuals.
Ask the previous owner, once. Through the agent if necessary. Awkward, free, and it works surprisingly often.
Then stop trying codes
This is the important bit. Many electronic safes lock out for several minutes after a handful of wrong entries, and some have a relocker that triggers on what it interprets as tampering. Working through combinations is not persistence, it is making the eventual job longer and dearer.
Two or three attempts. Then leave it.
What opening it actually involves
It depends entirely on what the safe is. A budget hotel-style unit in a rental flat and a graded safe in a shop office are different jobs with different outcomes. Sometimes it opens with the mechanism intact and you keep using it. Sometimes the lock is the casualty, and then the question is whether a safe of that value is worth a new lock or whether you are better off replacing it.
You should be told which of those you are facing before anything starts, along with what each ends up costing. Photographs of the door, the lock and how it is installed usually answer it without a visit.
The authorisation part
Whatever is inside a safe is, by definition, something somebody wanted kept from other people. So ownership gets established first — the safe, and entitlement to be in the property it stands in. If you are a tenant or a guest, that means the owner authorising it, not just you wanting it open.
Nobody enjoys being asked. Everybody would want it asked if the safe were theirs.
If this is where you have got to, the page you want next is a safe that will not open.