LAND GRABBING GAINS MOMENTUM
Imagine you find a dream property in the south of Spain, carry out all the normal searches, purchase the land and register the deeds in your name at the Spanish Land Registry Office. You build your house and live happily ever after?
In our case, several years later, the Department of the Environment informed us that there was a 35.7 metre drove road (vía pecuaria) going through our land and a 2 hectare livestock resting place (descansadero) next to it and on part of it, and that what we thought was ours is not.
My wife and I have been fighting the DOE on this issue for the last six years. I wouldn’t mind so much except that in our particular case, there already is a public footpath leading to the village running along one of the boundaries of our land. Indeed, the drove road wasn’t even on our land until they classified it in 1969, about twenty years before we purchased the property. All other evidence available at the provincial archives bears out that the drove road was merely extended for convenience sake. Even though there are miles and miles of proven drove road in the rest of the municipality -coincidentally shortly after we had refused the Town Council permission to drive a road through our property-, only the boundaries on the drove road on our land were referred to the DOE for the boundaries to be defined on them.
Worse still the DOE are both judge and executioner in this extraordinary miscarriage of justice, until the disgruntled owner can have their case heard by the High Provincial Court, which in some cases can take nine years. It took us three years to have our appeal admitted to court!
In the meantime, any procedures both proposed and approved by the DOE themselves are enforceable. In our particular case, this means that very soon they will be able to enter our property, remove our fences, cut my trees down and –wait for it- make a public car park where our walnut grove is.
The DOE are consistently abusing their power insofar as that what the drove rode legislation actually says is not that the three main kinds of drove road (Cañadas, Cordeles and Veredas) have a specific width, but that they have a maximum width of 75, 37.5 and 20 metres respectively, in spite of which the DOE is systematically applying the maximum width to virtually all current procedures for defining such boundaries.
May I through the pages of your newspaper encourage any owners affected by similar problems to contact me by e-mail, with a view to forming an association to protect our rights and taking this matter to Brussels. Please send all e-mails to the following address: interpretec@laescribana.com with the abbreviation AAVP (Asociación de Afectados por las Vías Pecuarias) in the subject line.