The conflict that for five years has prevented 1,200 owners of buildings located on a stretch of the seafront of Platja d'Aro from registering sales transactions or inheritance transfers has opened a new chapter that may be a small silver lining for the affected.
A 2013 law indicated, to the surprise of those affected, that a portion of buildings on a 650-meter stretch of Gran beach were located in an area of public maritime-terrestrial domain, property of the State.
The City Council and those affected are struggling to change a situation that leaves them in legal limbo since in 2019, the new property registrar refused to register sales and other operations.
A year ago, the Platja d'Aro City Council presented a contentious appeal to the National Court, pending a ruling, against the administrative silence of the competent ministry in response to the requirements in which it was claimed that the municipal area be excluded from the maritime terrestrial public domain. . Now, another administrative lawsuit promoted by the lawyer and professor of Law at the Complutense Faculty of Madrid, Emili Suñé, could soon be added to that appeal.
Owner of three affected properties, he explains that the owners “are the victims” of a “totally Kafkaesque situation”, of a first-order “urban planning mess” in which even the Constitutional Court intervened in 2015 without closing the issue. This lawyer, an expert in administrative law, wonders how it could be that for 74 years no one knew that Platja d'Aro was affected by the demarcation. The state places the first delimitation of the maritime-terrestrial zone in 1945.
"A property registrar is not stupid, nor are City Hall officials or notaries... Why didn't the Coastal Department say anything when it was being built at its own expense?" Questions – says Suñé – that made him open his eyes. “I had doubts that Platja d’Aro had ever affected the public domain,” he says. Some of the frontline buildings involved in this situation were built in the 1960s and 1970s.
The professor assumes that two of the ministerial orders on which the State would have relied to delimit the boundary in Platja d'Aro could be null or have defects in form that would support their nullity. The first is from 1945. "No one has seen that order, not even in the Official Bulletins of the Province (BOP) of those dates does there appear any mention of Platja d'Aro or other forms of toponymy of the municipality used at that time," he explains. .
Suñé has requested that the Ministry of Ecological Transition be able to see that order to know if it actually exists and to know its content. The professor remembers that at that time the Coastal Law did not yet exist, since the first dates back to 1969. Neither did the State Heritage Law, the first is from April 1964, which is what gave rise to the public domain operation. . The regulations that he governed then were the Ports Law of 1928, respectful of private property, and the Civil Code.
The second ministerial order that he doubts is from the year 2000. “It is a secret order, only communicated internally between the Ministry of the Environment and the Provincial Coastal Service, which has never been published and which we have learned about through coincidence,” says Suñé, who is in contact with the 15 affected neighborhood communities to all join in a lawsuit that they will present administratively.
Two anomalies that could give rise to the recognition of those affected as always full owners of their properties.
