Hi all!

This is my third year living in Spain and my third rental apartment here. I?ve never had any issue until now. I moved into a new place three weeks ago. I am sharing with a new colleague who moved over from Canada at the same time. Prior to moving in the landlady rented the apartment out on air bnb for three months.

Last week we found bed bugs. Not many, and no other evidence of their infestation. But we now knew they were there. We contacted the landlady to organise a treatment, our boss kindly organised someone to come, and then she said she wouldn?t have the invoice in her name and that she wanted to spend a few days researching before doing anything. She also insisted that we brought them in and that there was no way she, or any of the air bnb guests brought them in. We have reasons to believe they were sealed up in bags of sheets supplied by the landlady which we opened when we started to unpack, which is why we are only now seeing the signs of an infestation. She won?t have a bar of that, though.

We were so distraught that we didn?t put the invoice in her name and went ahead with the treatment. With all the money we?ve spent on the treatment, buying bags to store our clothes, washing and drying everything at the Laundromat, and looking at buying a vacuum cleaner, the thought that the landlady is not contributing to this at all is really bothering us. We both only work part time, our Spanish isn?t great so this is a really stressful situation. We are considering telling her that if she won?t pay at least half of the costs of this nightmare then we will give notice and leave. HOWEVER - we have a rental contract for 9 months all in Spanish. She breezed through the translation and when we questioned her on the clause about paying out the contract should we have to leave she said she just got a sample contract off the internet and we could have a verbal agreement that we could leave after giving a month?s notice and helping to find new tenants. In this case I feel like she will definitely go back on this promise. 

Can anyone give us some advice on how to handle the situation? Bed bugs are actually a phobia of mine and this whole thing has me under an enormous about of stress, I am hardly able to handle the anxiety. I am seriously considering going back to Australia without any belongings to escape this.