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Knocked down In shades of the Priors, British expat forced to demolish 17-year home to live in a van on the land
GOING; GOING; GONE: Gurney Davey watches as his home is torn down and reduced to a pile of rubble, while (top) the Priors
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EXCLUSIVE By Katherine Brook my wife,” Davey, 67, told the Olive Press this week. Speaking half-way through Friday’s demolition that cost him €1,600, he added it had actually come as ‘some sort of relief’. Having been forced to hire a digger, after disconnecting the electricity supply and water, he was on the final leg of a legal battle that began in 2004. That was the year the legal firm, Manzanares, informed him he would be getting a licence for an almacen (or storeroom), which would allow him to build the house in Tolox, near Ronda.
Local clamp down THE Valencian authorities are clamping down on rural properties believing ‘tens of thousands’ of them could be illegally built. They now have up to 15 years to review the planning status of any property built on rural, non-urban land. Illegal property owners could face heavy fines and in the worse case scenario be forced to demolish their homes. It comes after the Territorial Planning, Urban Development, and the Countryside law (LOTUP) was introduced in 2014. It was meant to streamline the planning process to a maximum of one year. Many applications are taking up to 12 months and paying up to €10,000, reveals a 2020 planning report by the company ASPRIMA.
“We thought we had done everything right. We got legal advice and went through a lawyer in order to get permission to build the home,” Gurney explained. But he was later told that his house was one of around 350 that were illegally given planning permission by the former mayor, Juan Vera, who landed up with a prison sentence.
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He was eventually told it had to be demolished to avoid a sixmonth prison sentence with the news coming just after his wife died from bowel cancer, at the age of 71. “But thankfully it is now over,” he explained. “It has been going on for so long now, I’ve finally come to terms with what needs to be done. Having it demolished was actually a relief.” 147 834 As he still owns the952land, he can still live on it - just not in a house. So now the father-of-three is planning a minimalist life staying in a converted van, so that his five dogs still have the space to roam. “This land is my home, it is my life and these dogs are all I have left.” Whether or not he still faces a prison sentence, is yet to be confirmed. It is not the first time British ex* O f f e r
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British expat faces demolition of his 17 year home - and a spell in prison repeat of controversial Priors - in case
AN expat is facing prison for failing to demolish his home after he fell foul of a town hall’s ‘laissez faire’ planning rules. Gurney Davey, aged 67, only found out about the six-month sentence when a court document was delivered to a neighbour’s house. “I went straight to Tolox town hall with it. They told me I shouldn’t have received it yet,” he told the Olive Press. “They said they were going to be sending the notification to me once they had stamped it.” The news came as a massive bolt from the blue for Davey, whose wife has just died of cancer, which he believes worsened from the stress of the case. He had never been told about the court case that followed on from a Guardia Civil denuncia for an ‘illegal build’. Davey’s two-bed home - built in 2004 - should never have been built according to the Malaga court.
Legalise
In 2016, and then again in 2017, Davey was ordered to knock down his house, but, in common with a neighbour, he waited for more details. While his Spanish neighbour, Irene Millan, 29, did eventually hear from the court again, she was given six months to ‘legalise’ her property - an option Davey was never given. However, his neighbour’s apparent good luck turned into a poisoned chalice. Having spent €20,000 with the town hall to legalise the dwelling, the court finally refused to accept the new paperwork provided by the council. Instead, demolition was ordered which went ahead last week. To add insult to injury Irene’s 54-year-old father, Manuel Mil-
DEMOLITION: Expat Gurney
Davey is being forced to knock
lan, whose name was on the deeds, was also sentenced to six months jail and handed a fine of €6 a day for a year. Now Davey is terrified he is set to lose his home at any moment. It comes just two months since his wife Diana died from bowel
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cancer, at the age of 71, in April. “We thought we had done everything right at the time. We got legal advice and went through lawyer in order to get permissiona to build the home. “Diana fought breast cancer for six years before bowel cancer I am sure the
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IT was a day that disgraced Spain. A day that an expat was forced to demolish his home of 17 years, despite having paid for planning permission. Brick by brick, tile by tile, British resident Gurney Davey tore down the house he had built for €150,000, after receiving shocking advice from a Malaga legal firm. That it came just two months after his wife, Diana, died from cancer simply magnifies the sheer tragedy. “I was distraught at first, my blood pressure was sky high and then I lost
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A TRIO of Costa Blanca mayors are facing trial for COVID vaccine ‘queue-jumping’. Anti-corruption prosecutors have sent detailed reports to their local courts to decide whether to proceed. One of them, the PP mayor of La Nucia, Bernabe Cano, has already been ordered to appear at Villajoyosa court on July 7, along with 12 witnesses. Cano claimed he needed the jab because he was a doctor for a local football team. Meanwhile, Carolina Vives, of Els Poblets, and her partner, Ximo Coll, mayor of neighbouring El Verger, are facing trial after getting the vaccines in January. They claimed they took the jabs after a local medical centre said they were ‘left over’ and would ‘go to waste’ if they did not use them. At the time, vaccinations were strictly limited to care home residents and staff, along with health service workers. All three mayors refused to resign. The prosecutor has dropped cases against other ‘early vaxers’ including the Bishop of the Orihuela.
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stress brought it on.” The couple, originally from Suffolk in the UK, spent €150,000 building their property. “It came as a package - a plot with a new home on it.” Davey admits he and his wife were perhaps naive to follow the advice of their lawyer. The lawyer,
six months jail
from legal firm Manzanares, told them that planning permission would be applied for as an almacen - or ‘warehouse’. This way it would come under the remit of Tolox town hall, which would give permission and later they could ‘legalise’ the property. The language of one legal letter, seen by the Olive Press, suggests this would be a mere formality. But the property never got legalised. In fact, the Tolox mayor of the time, Juan Vera, has since been jailed and fined for his part in scheme to allow up to 350 prop-a erties to be built on land classified as ‘rural’. In most cases he had used the very same ‘lax’ procedure of applying to build an ‘almacen’ to try to keep the prying eyes of the Junta authorities away. “We thought that was the way things worked in Spain,” said Davey, a retired builder. “We went to see a lawyer and got advice. It turns out that was not
the smart thing to do. “Why would we deliberately try to build illegally? It makes no sense that we would sell up everything in the UK and risk it all.” Now Davey’s first thoughts are to avoid serving the jail sentence. He said: “My lawyer is trying to get the sentence suspended.”
Flatten
In the meantime he has been forced to ask the town hall for permission to knock his own property down. “I will do it myself. I will borrow a JCB from someone and flatten my home of the past 17 years. will not let the town hall do it andI charge me more money.” He added: “I’ve no idea where to live afterwards. But the land still mine - maybe I can live in is a tent.” Tolox Ayuntamiento refused to comment, citing data protection laws. Opinion Page 6
pats have had their homes demolished in Andalucia, with the Priors, in Almeria, the most famous victims.
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Prison They still live in the garage of their house today, over 10 years since the house was knocked down in Vera. Opinion Page 6