Living in Spain

My lawyer once told me I could park my car in this country wherever it didn’t say I couldn’t, because in Spain, where the law is written in stone and justice is too often buried beneath mountains of paperwork, anything that is not expressly prohibited in writing is allowed.
This partly explains some of the extraordinary court decisions made in this country over recent years, where a man who stabs his wife to death gets a minimum sentence based on a law that denies common sense, because common sense is not written into law, while another man who stabs his kidnapper to death gets a maximum sentence because he exceeded the number of stabs deemed necessary to protect himself and his wife, still tied to a chair, from violent death.
I was thinking of the law while sitting in the shade of a chiringuito on a beach near Marbella a few weeks ago, wondering if they were going to stick to the letter of the Ley de Costas and tear it down. But on the way to Marbella from northern Spain, I had passed a few dozen of the ninety Osborne bulls sitting on hilltops all over the country. Due to the introduction of a roadside advertising law some years ago, they too were in danger of being torn down, but in the end, wiser heads prevailed and they were declared to be part of our national heritage.
In the meantime, I read in the newspapers, the fate of each chiringuito is to be decided individually, not collectively, and many are likely to be saved from the Ley de Costas. This is a huge step ahead for the law in this country.
But they could go a step further. They could declare all the things and places we love as national heritage, and write laws with built-in loopholes for common sense to peep through.
They could declare legal those beautiful fishermen’s houses in the Canary Islands, which they have already started to knock down because of the Ley de Costas. They could leave the colourful rowboats and sailing boats in the bays of coastal towns and villages along the Spanish coastline and not insist that their owners move them to marinas because, even if they make the bays more beautiful, they do not comply with urban planning laws.
They could realise that in the ‘state of law’ they love to talk about, the rights of the people are best protected by protecting people one by one and not collectively, and if some people purchased houses legally, they have a legal right to live in them, even if that means trampling on some collective rights.
If they can find a way around the law as it stands in relation to Osborne bull-boards and beach bars for the good of all the people, they can surely find a way around the Ley de Costas for the good of some of the people.
The law may be an ass, as Mr Bumble said, but I read somewhere that in Spain, even the asses are protected by law.

Filed under: General by Vivion O'Kelly