Short answer. Yes. Each spouse keeps ownership, possession, administration, and enjoyment of their own exclusive property, but either spouse may hand over its administration to the other during the marriage, provided this is done through a public instrument recorded in the registry of property where the property is located.
What the law says
The spouses retain the ownership, possession, administration and enjoyment of their exclusive properties. Either spouse may, during the marriage, transfer the administration of his or her exclusive property to the other by means of a public instrument, which shall be recorded in the registry of property of the place the property is located.
Family Code, Article 110 — Ownership and Administration of Exclusive Property. Read the full provision →
The default rule under a conjugal partnership
Under a conjugal partnership of gains, property that belongs exclusively to one spouse stays that spouse's own to own, possess, administer, and enjoy. The partnership regime governs what the spouses earn and acquire together during the marriage; it does not, by itself, strip either spouse of control over property that remains separately theirs. Administration of exclusive property is, by default, something each spouse handles on their own.
Transferring administration is allowed, but only this way
The law lets a spouse transfer administration of exclusive property to the other spouse during the marriage, but only if it is done through a public instrument, a notarized document, that is then recorded in the registry of property of the place where the property is located. An informal understanding between spouses, without that documented and recorded step, does not carry the same legal effect.
Administration is not the same as ownership
Handing over administration to a spouse does not transfer ownership of the property itself. What changes is who manages it, collects its income, and makes the day-to-day decisions about it; ownership stays exactly where it was. This distinction matters if the marriage later ends or the spouses' arrangement changes, since the property remains the exclusive property of the spouse who owned it before the administration was delegated.
The line is drawn again in Article 111, which lets a spouse of age mortgage, encumber, alienate or otherwise dispose of his or her exclusive property without the other's consent, and appear alone in court over it. Those powers stay with the owner-spouse. An administrator manages; disposing of the property is a different act and needs authority of its own.
Why the formalities exist
Requiring a public instrument and its recording is what makes the delegation binding and verifiable, both between the spouses and toward third parties who might deal with the property, such as tenants, buyers, or creditors. Without following that process, a spouse who has simply been managing the other's property informally may find it harder to establish, if a dispute arises, that they were validly authorized to act as administrator rather than simply helping out.
It is also worth knowing how the arrangement ends. Under Article 112, an alienation of exclusive property that the other spouse has been administering automatically terminates that administration, and the proceeds are to be turned over to the owner-spouse. The delegation is tied to the property: sell it, and the authority to manage it goes with it, with the money returning to the spouse who owned the asset rather than staying in the administrator's hands.
What Article 110 leaves unaddressed
The article does not say how a spouse revokes the delegation once given, whether the same public-instrument-and-recording process applies to undo it, or whether administration can be delegated for only part of the property rather than all of it. It binds only the two spouses and whoever later deals with the recorded instrument — it does not, on its own text, say anything about administration arrangements made before the marriage began.