Sonae Sierra Buys Nine Mercadona Supermarkets in Spain for Its €600 Million Food-Retail Fund

Sonae Sierra, the property arm of Portugal's Sonae group, has bought nine Mercadona supermarkets in Spain, extending a food-retail push that has become one of the more revealing corners of the group's strategy this year.

The stores were acquired from MDSR, an Israeli investment fund, and the price was not disclosed. They sit across six Spanish regions — Catalonia, Aragón, Andalusia, Asturias, Navarre and Extremadura — and add roughly 15,000 square metres of retail space to Sonae Sierra's books. All nine are let on long-term leases to Mercadona, Spain's dominant grocery chain, which means the buildings arrive with a tenant already locked in for years.

The deal was done through the Hahn Sierra Food Retail Fund, a vehicle Sonae Sierra set up in May 2026 with Germany's Hahn Gruppe. The fund is aiming to reach €600 million in assets and is designed to hunt for supermarket property across southern Europe. Its first five purchases, worth about €70 million, included two Continente Bom Dia stores in Portugal alongside Spanish sites — so this batch of nine roughly triples the portfolio in a single move.

There is a neat symmetry to the transaction. MDSR had itself bought 27 properties directly from Mercadona back in 2021 for around €100 million, in the kind of sale-and-leaseback arrangement that lets a retailer free up cash while staying put in its own shops. Five years on, part of that portfolio is now changing hands again, this time landing with a Portuguese-managed fund.

Why supermarkets?

The logic is less about groceries than about predictability. Supermarket buildings on long leases throw off steady, inflation-linked rent from tenants that keep trading through good times and bad — people buy food in a downturn as well as a boom. For institutional investors nervous about offices and uncertain about shopping centres, that reliability has made food retail one of the most sought-after property classes in Europe.

Sonae Sierra, better known for building and running large shopping centres, has been quietly leaning into this niche. Beyond the new fund, it has assembled a separate cluster of supermarkets in Germany and has spent the year reshaping its wider portfolio — selling a stake in a Brazilian shopping centre for €95 million in February and circling much larger retail-park deals in Spain.

The Mercadona purchase fits that pattern: smaller, lower-drama assets that generate dependable income and can be bundled into funds that outside investors are willing to back. Hahn Gruppe brings German institutional money to the table, while Sonae Sierra supplies the deal-making and management on the ground.

For Sonae, the parent group whose interests span the Continente supermarkets, telecoms and technology, the appeal is straightforward. Property funds let it earn management fees and recycle capital without tying up its own balance sheet in bricks and mortar. Expect more of these bite-sized supermarket deals across Iberia and central Europe before the €600 million target is reached.