Sun, Apr 20, 2008 page12

• Spanish push for clean beaches targets beloved seaside villas

  Enforcing a much-neglected law from 1988, the government is getting tough about coastal public domain

  • By Ciaran Giles / AP
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  It’s been the dream of millions — a home by the sea in sunny Spain. People from all over Europe have invested hard-earned savings in coastal villas and apartments. Now a government drive to clean up Spain’s concrete-filled coastline after decades of abuse may wash away many of those dreams like castles of sand.

  Enforcing a much-neglected 1988 law, the government is getting tough about what constitutes coastal public domain — the strip of land stretching back from the water’s edge — and telling thousands of house and apartment owners their properties do not really belong to them.

  “Out of the blue we’ve been told the house we have owned for more than 30 years is no longer ours,” said retired British electronics engineer Clifford Carter, 59, who lives with his Spanish wife in La Casbah, a beach-side complex in eastern Spain.

  

  A man walks through La Casbah, a beach-side complex near Valencia, Spain, on April 2. People from all over Europe have invested in second homes in Spain, but a government drive targeting seaside property could jeopardize their dreams of retirement on a sunny beach.

  PHOTO: AP

  “The house was built legally, but now they say we can only live here until we die but can’t sell the house or leave it to our children,” Carter said.

  The fears of losing coastal villas come as Spain’s real estate market is turning sour, a situation tied by some to the international banking crisis and its parent, the US subprime mortgage scandal. While the troubles of Spain’s overgrown coast are not directly tied to the banking crisis, both have involved shady business practices that often wind up in the lap of individual homeowners.

  Along the Spanish coast, a protest group formed in January says it already represents 20,000 people. It notes that up to half a million others — apartment and villa owners and restaurant and hotel proprietors — could be affected. Most are Spaniards, but many are foreigners.

  “This is the single biggest assault on private property we have seen in the recent history of Spain,” said Jose Ortega, a spokesman for the group and lawyer for many of those affected.

  He says that at best, owners are being given 60-year concessions to live on the property or operate their businesses. Others, he claims, are threatened outright with demolition.

  The government says the claims are exaggerated but insists the coast has to be saved.

  “We’re taking the law seriously,” said the Environment Ministry’s coastal department director, Jose Fernandez. “Previous governments didn’t think it was important, while we have made it a priority.”

  The government is finishing the process of drawing the line that designates what is state-owned and cannot contain private property along Spain’s 10,000km of coast.

  It plans to spend some US$8 billion to fix up some 220 million square meters of coast. Some of the money will go to homeowners who, under the 1988 law, cannot sell to another private party but can sell to the state.

  Many people are suddenly finding they’re on the wrong side of the dividing line. Ortega’s group alleges the government is drawing it selectively, targeting individuals but shying away from big tourist resorts.

  But it’s not just individuals. The massive five-star Hotel Sidi lies a stone’s throw from retired engineer Carter’s house and the shoreline. Last December its owners were told it had been built on dune land protected by the 1988 law and must go. They are being offered a 60-year operating concession, after which it falls into the hands of the state.

  “We’re afraid that they’ll take away the property. It was built legally with all the papers,” said Roger Zimmermann, the hotel’s Swiss managing director. “This is our livelihood.”

  Fernandez said 1,300 structures had been demolished since the Socialists came to power in 2004, adding that most were constructed with no building permit. He denied that the government had plans for mass demolitions or immediate expropriations. Barring exceptional cases, he said, people whose property is in the public domain will be able to continue living or working there.

  But the news could impact the country’s property market, which would be bad news for a real estate sector that has largely driven the national economy for the past decade but is cooling.

  The Costa del Sol Association of Builders and Promoters reported in February that overall sales of tourist property in southern Malaga fell nearly 50 percent last year.

  Mass tourism and rampant construction over the past three decades have turned the Spanish coast from the French border all the way round and beyond the Rock of Gibraltar into a continuous mass of concrete.

  In many cases, town halls bypassed planning regulations and took bribes in exchange for licenses.

  “It was the politics of money today, forget about tomorrow,” said Luis Cerrillo, head of the Ecologists in Action group in the Valencia region.

  Spain, the world’s No. 2 tourism destination, is the most popular choice for northern Europeans seeking to own a second home. Just British residents in Spain are believed to amount to nearly 1 million — though it’s not certain how many own property.

  Most observers agree it is no coincidence that the coastal clean-up drive follows a real-estate fraud scandal on the Costa del Sol in 2006 in which 80 people face charges.

  Gordon Turnbull of Blue Med estate agents in the eastern Murcia region blamed the corruption scandals for dropping sales, but said that the coastal law might stimulate the market by making the coast prettier.

  On two nearby beaches, he says there are the shells of two major apartment buildings, illegal and unfinished monstrosities.

  “They put people off buying here,” Turnbull said. “People appreciate seeing an eyesore getting knocked down. The government’s not doing enough.”

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