Short answer. If the interruption lasted one year or less, the time you already accumulated is not lost — the law expressly says it shall be counted in your favor. Your prescription period continues; only a break longer than one year erases the prior possession.
What the law says
If the natural interruption is for only one year or less, the time elapsed shall be counted in favor of the prescription.
Civil Code, Article 1122 — Interruption of One Year or Less. Read the full provision →
What Article 1122 says
Article 1122 of the Civil Code addresses natural interruption — a physical break in possession, such as when someone else takes control of the land, or when possession is otherwise lost through events in the external world. The rule is precise: if that interruption lasts for only one year or less, the time already elapsed shall be counted in favor of the prescription. The break does not reset your clock; it merely suspends it for the duration of the interruption itself.
The one-year threshold
The statute draws the line at one year. An interruption that equals exactly one year still falls within the protection of Article 1122 — the phrase is "one year or less." If your possession was lost for twelve months and then restored, you may add all of the time you held the land before the break to the time you held it after. The law treats the period of interruption as simply not counting, rather than erasing everything that came before it. Only a break that exceeds one year would wipe out prior time already accumulated under the rules on natural interruption.
Why this rule matters for land disputes
Acquisitive prescription — the process of gaining ownership of land through continuous, open, and uninterrupted possession for the statutory period — can take many years. Landholders sometimes face brief disruptions: a neighboring family physically occupies part of the property, a dispute causes them to withdraw temporarily, or a calamity forces them off for several months. Without the protection of Article 1122, any such event would force a claimant to start the prescription period from zero. The rule prevents that harsh outcome whenever the interruption was genuinely brief. If you believe your situation involves a break that lasted exactly one year or close to it, the precise dates matter — document the day possession was lost and the day it was regained.
What is not covered
Article 1122 specifically covers natural interruption. Civil interruption — for instance, a legal action filed against your possession — is governed by separate provisions of the Civil Code. Whether a judicial demand or an acknowledgment by the possessor interrupts prescription, and what effect that has, depends on those other rules, not on Article 1122. If your break in possession arose from litigation, a court order, or your own legal acts rather than from a physical loss of the land, the analysis changes. The one-year grace period in Article 1122 applies to physical, factual breaks in possession, not to legal acts that interrupt the running of prescription.