Spain Property RightsBuyers inValencia beware: if the local council decides it wants your land for a new housing development you could be out of pocket, if not out of home, and there's no legal comeback. Leslie Crawford reports and below, talks to lawyers and campaigners who are fighting back
LIEVE de Clippel and Hubert van Bel spent 18 years carefully restoring their villa on the Mediterranean, joining four 18th- century farm buildings into a single, 1,000 sq m home that overlooks a terraced valley of orange groves and almond trees. The couple, antiques dealers from Belgium, travelled the length and breadth of Spain to find materials for the restoration: stone columns, antique doors, old oak for the beams and 300-year-old terracotta tiles for the terrace.
It is now a stunning home that would not look out of place in the pages of Architectural Digest or House & Garden. Tall, gently swaying palm trees mark the highest point of their estate, which has dramatic views of the Rock of Ifach jutting out of the deep blue sea at Calpe, on the Alicante coast.
But thanks to Valencia's controversial town-planning laws, Lieve and Hubert's home will probably be razed to the ground, and their 30-hectare property carved up into tiny plots for a new housing development.
Last November, the couple received a letter that shattered their lives. It informed them that the municipality of Benissa, to which they belong, had approved a new housing development for 104 homes to be built on their property and the terraced slopes of the adjoining valley, known as Coma del Pou.
According to Valencia's town-planning laws, existing landowners do not have to be consulted before new housing projects are approved. Land can be confiscated with only minimal compensation, and landowners may be forced to pay hundreds of thousands of euros for the "urbanisation" of their plots, even when services such as roads, piped water and electricity already exist.
Thousands of homeowners have been affected by Valencia's "land- grab" laws, and the problem is spreading as other regions, including Andalusia, Murcia and Madrid, adopt similar town-planning regulations.
More than 15,000 affected landowners have banded together to denounce Valencia's town-planning regulations before the European Parliament. Last month the European Commission took note and began legal proceedings against Spain to force the government to correct breaches of EU law contained in the Valencian law.
For the moment, the Commission is concentrating on the fact that housing projects in Valencia are not put out to public tender in violation of EU public procurement laws. But other actions could follow.
In addition, Irwin Mitchell, a large UK law firm that specialises in human rights cases, is preparing to challenge Valencia's land- grab law before the European Court of Human Rights.
All of this, however, may come too late to save Lieve and Hubert's home. Because town halls do not make town plans available to the public, Lieve and Hubert had to pay €550 to a notary public to obtain a copy of the Coma del Pou "urbanisation plan". It confirmed their worst fears.
Not only was their property to be carved up into 17 plots; there was no trace of their house in the plans submitted by the property developer. By some mysterious, and as yet unexplained sleight of hand, the land registry office had deleted all records of the 18th- century dwelling. "I took along the tax receipts I had paid on our property over all these years," Lieve says. "But the land registry officials just shrugged their shoulders. They said it would take months to investigate the matter."
With no proof of their home's "existence", Urba-Benissa, the company that will develop the Coma del Pou housing development, will be free to raze the property, replacing a meticulously restored villa with 17 identical, pastel-coloured holiday homes.
If Lieve and Hubert want to keep part of their land (about half of it will go to the property developer and the town hall), they will have to pay more than €1 million for services they already have, such as roads and sewerage.
"This is legalised robbery," says Hubert. "The property developer does not need to show proof of financial solvency to propose a housing project. Urba-Benissa has a paid-up capital of just 3,000, but it will be able to kick-start the project with the fees and land it confiscates from existing landowners. The company will start with our property because it has the best sea views. It will be under no obligation to finish the entire 104-house project.
"And then original landowners, like ourselves, will have no one to claim compensation from even if we were to fight this in the courts."
Lieve and Hubert have filed challenges to the urbanisation project with Benissa's town council, but received only threats in response. Juan Bautista Rosello, Benissa's mayor, warned Hubert that the more they complained in public, the less chance they stood of keeping their home.
Rosello declined to be interviewed for this article. But it is clear that Spain's 10-year-old property boom - heavily concentrated on the Mediterranean coast - has inflated the ambitions of the Benissa mayor, who recently raised his salary to €50,700 a year - more than the earnings of a supreme court judge.
ROSELLO'S latest plan is to create a suburb of 2,000 homes along a new ring-road around his small town (population: 11,700). The ring-road will be wider than an airport runway and have palm trees planted down the middle. The new houses will be built on the land of nine farmers, who will have to contribute €22m towards the €30m cost of the project. If they don't cough up, they will lose their land.
Lieve and Hubert, meanwhile, are close to giving up the fight. They are planning to return to Belgium, where they are building a house. "Even if we saved our home here, it would break my heart to see the Coma del Pou valley destroyed. I do not want to live surrounded by identical holiday homes," Lieve says.
