What a 72-hour kit costs in Spain: bought or built

What the ready-made kits cost

We priced every ready-made 72-hour kit for one or two people that we found on a Spanish shop’s own product page, with food in it and at least a torch or a radio, a price on the page and an order button that works. Twelve kits passed that rule: nine for one person, three for two. Prices are those the shops showed on the date under the sources, with IVA (Spanish VAT) where the page says so.

Cheapest kit for one person²

€70.48

The middle of the nine³

€249.95

Dearest kit for one person⁴

€599.95

The middle figure is the median of the nine, our arithmetic. The three kits for two people cost €199.00, €289.00 and €699.95.⁵⁶⁷

Most of them come from specialist shops. Decathlon has a page called Kit de supervivencia 72 horas, but it sells the parts: rucksacks, thermal blankets, stoves, batteries.⁸ There’s no official kit to buy, either. The EU’s 72 hours and Spain’s lists are advice on what to keep, and no authority approves a kit; where a product title says “certified”, that’s the seller’s word. Where the three days come from is in what the EU and Spain ask for in an emergency kit.

What a cheap, a middling and a dear kit contain

The price buys gear, mostly. Water and food, the two lines the official lists put first, are the ones to check.

The yardstick is the family guide the Spanish government published in 2025: at least 1.5 litres of drinking water a person a day, for three days, so 4.5 litres.¹ None of the nine one-person kits holds that much. The most any of them carries is 3 litres, and half of the twelve hold no stored water at all, only tablets or a filter. Food is the other gap: only three of the twelve pages say how many kcal the food gives. If you buy a kit, read those two lines before the piece count.

Building it from Spanish shops, item by item

Here’s the same list built from ordinary shop pages, taking the cheapest sensible item at Decathlon, MediaMarkt, Dia and Eroski. The Spanish word beside each item is the one on the shelf.

One 5-litre bottle covers Spain’s 4.5 litres. If you go by the British 3 litres a day, the figure the 72-hour kit list uses, buy two. The knife is on the list for its tin opener: the tins need one. Spend more where it saves you something later: a crank torch at Decathlon is €15.99,²⁰ and a crank-and-solar radio with a power bank built in is €69.99 from a MediaMarkt marketplace seller,²¹ so the radio stops depending on batteries.

Food is the line that moves the total

Three days of tins and jars for one person, about 6,300 kcal, among them fabada, lentils, chickpeas, tuna, sardines, pan tostado (toasted bread slices) and small cartons of UHT milk, cost €29.41 at Eroski.¹⁹ They weigh 4.68 kg, packs included, and the stews’ pages give heating instructions. Three packs of NRG-5 pressed bars, 6,900 kcal that are eaten as they are, cost €34.56 at liofilizado.es and weigh 1.5 kg.²²

Our box is the dearest of the three ways to fill that line. The 72-Hour Food Reserve costs €112.90, or €37.63 a day for 1,976 kcal, and weighs 1.5 kg. What the difference pays for is a porridge and two cooked mains a day, Chicken & Rice and Beef Goulash with Potatoes on the first: food you’d eat on an ordinary evening, which makes the box easy to eat up and replace. It needs 3.1 l of water on top of what you drink, so the water line grows with it.

In the bought kits the food line varies most of all: from 1,500 kcal for the three days to 7,500,²²³ and most pages give no figure. The four kinds of reserve food, tins, bars, wet rations and freeze-dried, are set against each other by cost per day, weight and water in emergency food compared.

From our range

72-Hour Food Reserve

Three days of breakfasts and mains for a kit you build yourself: 9 pouches.

€112.90Hear from us before the shop opensSee the box

Buy or build

Buy a kit if you want it done in one order and you’ll still add the water and check the food. Look for the kcal on the page and a water figure near 4.5 litres for one person; the piece count tells you about the tools, not the water.

Build it if you’d rather match the Spanish list line for line. For one person it came to €124.33 here, food and water included.

For two people the sums change in favour of sharing. A second 5-litre bottle, blanket, whistle and food basket add €36.19, so the pair comes to €160.52; the torch, radio, power bank, first-aid kit and knife do for both. The two-person kits on sale cost €199.00, €289.00 and €699.95, and the cheapest of them holds 3.96 litres of water for two, where the Spanish figure asks for 9.⁵¹

Either way, Spain’s guide asks for the kit to be checked every six months, dates included.¹ Put that day in the calendar, swap the batteries, and eat the oldest food in an ordinary week. If the kit is where you’re starting, what comes before it and what can wait is in prepping for beginners.