Short answer. Yes. The Civil Code allows servitudes to be established for the benefit of a community, or of one or more persons who do not own the burdened land. These are personal easements, and the benefit belongs to the people named rather than to any dominant estate.
What the law says
Servitudes may also be established for the benefit of a community, or of one or more persons to whom the encumbered estate does not belong.
Civil Code, Article 614 — Easements for Persons or a Community. Read the full provision →
Two kinds of easement, not one
Most people picture an easement as a relationship between two lots — a burdened lot and a benefited lot next to it. That is the real easement, and it is the common case. Article 614 recognises the other kind: servitudes may also be established for the benefit of a community, or of one or more persons to whom the encumbered estate does not belong. Here there is still a burdened property, but there is no dominant estate at all. The beneficiary is a person or a defined group of people. A right granted to the residents of a barangay to draw water from a spring, or to pass through private land to reach a chapel or a shore, is of this type.
Who can hold it, and what "community" means
The article's wording is deliberately wide — "a community, or one or more persons". The beneficiaries must nevertheless be identifiable, because a burden on land cannot be owed to the world at large. A group of named residents, the members of an association, the inhabitants of a place: these can hold a personal servitude. What the article also makes clear is that the beneficiary must be someone other than the owner of the burdened land. Nobody establishes a servitude over his own property in his own favour; a landowner using his own land in a particular way is simply exercising ownership, not exercising an easement.
How it differs from an easement attached to land
The practical differences follow from where the benefit sits. A real easement passes automatically with the dominant estate on sale or inheritance, because the easement is inseparable from that estate. A personal servitude has no estate to travel with, so it is tied to the person or group and does not automatically follow a sale of their homes. The burden, however, still runs against the servient land: it binds later owners of that land, especially where it is annotated on the certificate of title. Personal servitudes are also more readily limited in duration by the grant that created them, and can end when the person or the community identified ceases to exist.
If you are relying on a right like this
Get it in writing and get it annotated. A tolerated practice — the owner has let everyone cross for years and never objected — is not the same as a servitude, and tolerance can be withdrawn. Find the instrument that created the right, check whether it names the beneficiaries and fixes a term, and check the certificate of title of the burdened lot for the annotation. Where the right rests on long use rather than a document, whether it can ripen into an easement depends on the kind of easement involved, which is a question for counsel on the specific facts. Bring the deed, the title and any barangay records of the arrangement to that discussion.
Cases citing this provision
These Supreme Court decisions cite the provision above. We list them so you can read them yourself; the summaries of what each decided are not ours to give.
- Edilberto Alcantara, et al. vs. Cornelio B. Reta, et al, G.R. No. 136996, December 14, 2001 — read the decision on LawPhil →
Related provisions
- Civil Code, Article 614 — Easements for Persons or a Community
- Civil Code, Article 613 — Easement Defined
- Civil Code, Article 617 — Easements Are Inseparable