The Platja d'Aro City Council and the 1,200 owners of the 850 properties on the promenade affected by the Coastal Law will take legal action so that their flats, houses, garages, storage rooms... cease to be part of the domain area terrestrial maritime public.
Their situation had worsened even more since September 2019, with the change in criteria of the new Sant Feliu de Guíxols property registrar, which refuses to register sales or inheritance receipt operations in strict compliance with the law.
A way of proceeding different from that of its predecessor, which had no problems registering operations as domain title. The situation is causing serious problems for those who want to buy or sell.
The majority of buyers who need bank financing cannot access it as the property is not registered in the registry and sellers may end up accepting very low offers in order to be able to sell.
The start of the judicial route – agreed upon in a recent meeting called by the City Council at the request of the Passeig Marítim Association – comes after the formal request of the Platja d'Aro City Council to the General Directorate of Coasts to exclude from the public domain the municipal term. The deadline to respond to this request expired on March 31 and, given the silence in response, the City Council and private parties have decided to go to court.
The first to take these first steps will be the Consistory, which on Monday will formulate a request before the Ministry for the Ecological Transition urging the disaffection and informing that, if this is not the case, in thirty days they will file a contentious administrative appeal before the National Court " against inactivity" of the Administration.
The mayor, Maurici Jiménez, of the PSC, the same political color as the current government, trusts in a resolution of the case "in the short term" taking into account that there are other Spanish municipalities with "thousands of victims" for this cause.
The City Council's appeal will be added to another that will be filed later by the communities of owners, private individuals and the Platform for People Affected by the Public Domain. As the judicial process progresses, everything will be incorporated into the same case.
The president of the Passeig Marítim Association, Rafael Arau, says that "they are beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel" to resolve a situation that the 2013 Coastal Law left on standby. Its seventh additional provision excluded 12 population centers from the maritime-terrestrial public domain, including Platja d'Aro. But it was suspended when an unconstitutionality appeal was filed until in 2015 it was ratified by the Constitutional Court. Based on that sentence, the mayor requested in March 2021 from the Ministry for Ecological Transition the disaffection of the farms, something that has never happened.
The Platform for People Affected by the Public Domain and the property administrators celebrate the beginning of the judicial process so that the owners can recover the property at 100%. The administrator Xavier Domínguez points out that beyond the problems derived from the fact of not being able to register sales, the situation has caused a devaluation of the price of the apartments. “Groups have appeared that take advantage of these situations, with minimum reductions of 50% of their value,” he points out.
The also administrator and president of the platform for those affected, Albert Català, explains that a neighbor has been offered to buy her apartment for a third of the value. “The message is to hold on because in a maximum of one or two years this situation could be resolved,” he says.
