Spain and Portugal for Visitors

Posted by : John Ross on Oct 21, 2008 - 12:03 PM Property

The British and German embassies to Spain have requested clarification from the Ministerio del Medio Ambiente about the Ley de Costas, Law of the Coasts, of 1988. The law was intended to ensure public ownership of the seashore and public access to it, and made it illegal to build within 100 metres of the shoreline. It also declared this strip of land to be public property, but allowed use of it by existing buildings for a further 30 years, which may be extended to 60 years. This protects most existing buildings from immediate demolition, but owners are prohibited from selling affected properties during that time. Their protests are understandable, but just why has a 20-year old law become front-page news now? Find out here.

Most of the properties involved are second homes, and most of the affected owners are Spanish, but around 15% of the 45,000 properties involved belong to foreigners, mostly Germans and Britons. The problem has become topical because detailed surveys were necessary to determine exactly which properties should be classified as being inside the protected area, the "terrestrial-marine zone." This complicated process was interrupted during the two governments of the conservative PP, 1996-2004, and was resumed by Cristina Narbona, the first Socialist Environment Minister of the new century. The survey process - deslinde - is now over 80% complete, so it is precisely now, twenty years later, that most owners are receiving official notification that the law considers their properties to be in the public domain. And the thirty-year period of grace expires in 2018, suddenly just around the corner.

In Narbona's time at the head of the Ministry of the Environment, further movement was made towards recovering the Spanish coastline for the public. Notably, a detailed white paper called "Strategy for Sustainability of the Coast" was prepared, which considered the possibility of expropriations, even demolitions. But there has been no news about the "Estrategia" since last year, and the Law of the Coasts does not contemplate compensation to property owners. The PP in Galicia has called on the government to assume the financial liabilities such as mortgages associated with the property (or in lieu, an equivalent property not more than two kilometres away). Which highlights the fact that, in spite of the law, these properties have been being bought and sold all this time. In some cases, buyers will have acted in ignorance - property registries are not required to record properties' classification under the Law of the Coasts, and a common popular misconception is that the coastal strip defined is 50 metres wide, not 100. In others, I expect they have been simply hopeful that the Socialists would be thwarted by elections and the Law of the Coasts repealed, or neutraliized by regional legislation. And in others, I am afraid there is a long history in Spain of illegal constructions being legalized, or officially protected dwellings being traded on the open market, even though they cannot legally be bought or sold or even given away - mass legalizations of these transactions have long been dealt with by a "whoever lives there now owns it" decree, years or decades later. So many Spaniards, and perhaps some foreigners, will have bought properties on the shoreline without even checking their present or future legal status.

In addition, local authorities have been guilty, over and over again, of granting planning permission ignoring the Law of the Coasts, and credit agencies and banks both in Spain and abroad have been anxious to lend. As a result, many foreigners have acquired illegal homes on the costas in the genuine belief that they were legal.

The long-running complaints about the Valencian regional government's Draconian powers of expropriation still continue - EU pressure obliged it to repeal the original law, but they replaced it with another saying almost exactly the same. It is a similar issue, but not really directly related with the Law of the Coasts, except that it causes home owners the same kind of grief.

My own feeling is that the Ley de Costas was - is - urgently necessary to prevent the irretrievable loss of much of the Spanish coastline. But I am afraid innocents will inevitably be hurt. I just hope it won't be you.

More information:
PNALC, Spanish association of victims of the law
Ley de Costas, the law, in Spanish.
Abusive Application of the Law of the Coasts, also called the Ortega Report for the lawyer who produced it.
Costas Maritimas, Spanish-language blog lawyer José Ortega, see above