The whole story started for
me back in January 2008, when a phone-call from the BBC asked me to drive over to Vera (about ten kilometres away) and
take some photos of a house being demolished. A Brit’s house (otherwise, the BBC
wouldn’t have called). The home in question belonged to Len and Helen Prior.
They had built in a quiet area outside Vera, not in a flood-plain or a national
park or near a beach or on a projected train or road route, or even in a place
of particular beauty. The house, in an area where other similar houses stood on
their own acreage, had a pool and a garage.
The Junta de Andalucía, in
those days controlled by the PSOE and famously corrupt, had produced a rule
that towns could only grow by a fraction every eight years. A tiny village by
one house perhaps, a city by several thousand. Coupled to this remarkable
legislation, which naturally favoured the best-connected constructors, the
ecologists (who merrily ignore the huge environmental damage caused by the
plastic farms and other profitable sources of contamination) were firm in their
opposition to building houses without proper permits (and they didn’t mean town
hall permissions) and they had the ear of the government in Seville.
In Andalucía, Seville rules
the roost and no one particularly cares what happens in the farther reaches of
the autonomous region; and Cantoria, Vera, Zurgena, Albox and Arboleas in
Almería were very much off their map – until the ecologists alerted the authorities
to the one house per thousand (or whatever) rule, with the result that the town
halls discovered that they didn’t have as much power as they had thought. This
isn’t the time-share pitch, or the ‘off-plan’ gamble, or many other
sucker-scams, since everyone here wanted it to work: the buyers, the sellers
and the local business-people – after all, the funds brought from abroad would
keep the local supermarket, pharmacy, house-painter and bar in operation...
In 2008, the homes, aimed primarily
at foreign buyers, were abruptly deemed illegal and Andalucía discovered that
it had 300,000 of these (the size of the city of Málaga) which, the cheques
having cleared, they were now noticing. This meant threats, rare demolitions,
fines, invalid title deeds, and the water and electric cut. It also meant ruin
for many builders and even more so, for many foreign buyers – including the
Priors.
The stories of this example
of Spanish duplicity were reported around the world, causing the local
businesses in the small towns – where there is no tourism and not much of
anything else – to lose their chance to grow; and indeed, some of them are now
listed as ‘pueblos moribundos’ (dying
villages) or even abandonados (empty).
After all, few foreigners
want to retire to a Spanish city.
 |
| Maura Hillen from the AUAN |
A home-owners association
from the Costa Blanca – the AUN –
had been working on a different but equally trying problem: the ‘land grab’
(roughly: one’s home or surrounding land could be claimed by a neighbour who
had obtained papers to form an urbanisation). They helped set up in Albox a
sister association called AUAN
which, with no official support, eventually managed to get the Andalucian building
laws changed, beginning with the cosmetic of changing a vivienda ilegal into alegal
(a word that, if it existed in Spanish, would mean ‘sort-of-legal’). Maura
Hillen is an Irishwoman and has been at the helm of the AUAN, working tirelessly with endless trips to Seville with the
association’s lawyer English-born Gerardo Vásquez and her partner organisations
including the SOHA (based in the
Axarquía of Málaga with similar problems) and the Chiclana (Cádiz) based FEC and others.
This weekend, a press release
from the AUAN began: ‘Maura Hillen
has stepped down as President of Abusos
Urbanísticos Andalucía No (AUAN), after 11 years in the position, during
which she received an MBE from the British government for her work. Maura will
continue as an external consultant and spokesperson for the Association, to
help the new President, David Fisher, from Chiclana, a city with 15,000 alegal houses, at least during the
period of transition...’.
Well done Maura, you worked very
hard at this (when all you really wanted to do when you moved to Spain was to
retire quietly).
Len and Helen Prior, unknown
to Spaniards (who are familiar with few anglo expats beyond the TV football
pundit Michael Robinson, the Irish historian Ian Gibson and the Canadian TV
English-language teacher Richard Vaughan) became, unwillingly, the world’s best
known expats outside of Spain. Their house was demolished (the BBC sent me a
cheque for £100) but their pool and garage, for some reason on a separate escritura, survived. Despite it all, the
Priors, with their best of British pluck – you can imagine them brewing cups of
tea in the midst of the Blitz in 1940 – never left.
Eleven years later, they
still live there, in their converted garage.
A fragment from a bitter poem
by the late British poet laureate John Betjeman:
‘...That builder caught the wife and me all right!
Here on this tide-less, tourist-littered sea
We’re stuck. You’d hate it too if you were me:
There’s no piped water on the bloody site.
Our savings gone, we climb the stony path
Back to the house with scorpions in the bath’.
