The conflict that for the past five years has prevented 1,200 owners of buildings located on a section of the sea front of Platja d’Aro from registering transactions of sale or transfer of inheritances has opened a new chapter that can be a small loophole of hope for those affected. A 2013 law indicated, to the surprise of those affected, that some of the properties located in front of Playa Gran were located in an area of ??maritime public domain, owned by the State.
The City Council and those affected are fighting to change a situation that leaves them in a legal limbo, since in 2019 the new property registrar refused to register sales and other operations. A year ago, the City Council of Platja d’Aro presented to the National Court a contentious appeal, pending judgment, against the administrative silence of the competent ministry in view of the requirements in which it was demanded that it be excluded from the public domain maritime land the municipal term. Now, this appeal could soon be joined by another administrative claim promoted by the lawyer and Professor of Law at the Complutense Faculty of Madrid, Emili Suñé.
Owner of three affected properties, he explains that “they are the victims” of a “totally Kafkaesque situation”, of an “urban planning mess” of the first order in which even the Constitutional Court intervened in 2015 without closing the issue . This lawyer, an expert in administrative law, wonders how it is possible that over the course of 74 years no one knew that Platja d’Aro was affected by the delimitation. The State places the first delimitation of the land-sea area in 1945.
“A property registrar is not stupid, neither are City Council officials or notaries… Why didn’t the Department of Coasts say anything when it was being built in front of its own coast?”. Questions – says Suñé – that opened his eyes. “I doubted that Platja d’Aro had ever had any impact on the public domain,” he says. Some of the first-line buildings involved in this situation were built during the sixties and seventies.
The professor starts from the basis that two of the ministerial orders on which the State would have relied to make the delimitation in Platja d’Aro could be null or have defects in form that would guarantee their nullity. The first is from the year 1945. “No one has seen that order, not even in the official gazettes of the province (BOP) of those dates there is no mention of Platja d’Aro or other forms of toponymy of the municipality used then”, he explains. Suñé has asked the Ministry of Ecological Transition to be able to see this order to know if it actually exists and to know its content. The professor recalls that at that time there was still no Costes law, since the first date was 1969. Neither was the State Heritage law, the first of which dates from April 1964, which is what gave rise to the operation of public domain The regulation that governed then was the Ports Law of 1928, respectful of private property and the Civil Code.
The second ministerial order 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 learned about coincidence”, asserts Suñé, who is in contact with the 15 communities of neighbors affected to go all together in a lawsuit that they will present through administrative means.
Two anomalies that could give rise to the recognition of those affected as full-right owners of their estates from time immemorial.
