ChiFRA

 The following history of the urbanisation/electricity issue in Chiclana has been written by Dave Fisher.  He admittedly has taken some poetic license, but that is mostly in his writing style.  The information is accurate (as accurate as it gets around here).  

The History (with a little bit of Artistic licence):

We all currently live in an illegal house, unless it was legal under the 1987 regulations. El Plan General de Ordenación Urbana, (P.G.O.U.), town plans made after 1987 (together with the Area de Gestíon Basica (AGB bylaws) have finally been declared illegal by the Supreme Court in Madrid. What then happened, the Ayuntamiento applied for permission under article 35 of la Ley de Ordenación Urbanística de Andalucía (LOUA) the “Grand Plan” by the Junta de Andalucia) for two years to allow “necessary” planning applications. This has since been approved. In reality this simply allows the Ayuntamiento to continue development while they finish their urbanization plan. It should be stated that houses built with planning permission under the various plans (now annulled) continue to be perfectly legal.

Remember, Chiclana is not the only town with problems; from the Costa del Sol in the south to Galicia in the North West of Spain; from Valencia with their “land grab laws” through the whole of the Costa Blanca there are examples of similar problems.

Let’s go back to early May this year a couple of weeks before the most recent local elections. The PSOE was in power and had been for a couple of years.  There was an Urbanisation Plan (the 2007 PGOU) that had been submitted by the Council which had been through all the local procedures.

It was known that there were some technical challenges to the plan and it was likely that it would be annulled so the City Council had prepared a new plan that fixed these errors and changed some areas from white to “urbanisable.” Also, some areas that had been yellow (urbanisable) or yellow and white striped (urbanisable in the next phase) were changed to white (and blue) due mostly to flooding issues.

Source: Diario Bahía de Cádiz 11th May

This is the opinion of the town planning delegate for Chiclana, Cándida Verdier. She explained the action being taken to resolve the problems that homeowners living in illegally built properties - on land not intended for the purposes of building - are currently faced with. She said that a solution allowing people in this predicament access to basic services was 'ever closer'.

Source: Diario de Cádiz    1st April 2011

José María Román will today declare, in a meeting of council members, the unanimous support of the town's politicians for the new agreement signed with residents´ groups with regard to the legalisation process. The mayor will make it clear that the legalisation process "will be done at cost price"