Up until now, legal literature related with the life insurance contract has been scarce. This article attempts to tackle this phenomenon by providing solid conceptual tools to insurance operators in regard to an essential subject: the insurable risk in life insurance. That is the reason why, by this means, the author makes specific reflections toward the most relevant issues in terms of the risk covered by this kind of insurance contracts in order to offer conclusions that, besides of being academically grounded (which is the obvious), aim to offer a pragmatic element that may be useful in the professional practice. Thus, in addition to the purely legal matters inherent to the foundation of the conclusions (such as the classes of insurable risks in life insurance, the scope of its concepts and its legal nature) the reader will find throughout the paper comments in respect to hypotheses that are not commonly treated in the theoretical field, but when they occur at a practical level, they must have adequate support to be resolved, such as it happens with the coverage of brain death, with the requirements of the legal presumption of death (death in absentia) in order to be considered as a covered event, with the reappearance of the insured in both death insurance and survival insurance, with the breach of the beneficiary’s reimbursement obligation in case of reappearance of the former insured, and with the consequences of the death in absentia in the survival insurance, among others; all situations that are parsed in this article.