Retirement Dream Home

You plan for it, longingly wait for it to transpire, then retirement becomes a reality, and your dream home abroad in the most salubrious geography you can imagine is yours. You live in your dream home, become part of a community of other expatriate retirees living their dream retirement. Within a larger community of native dwellers, citizens of your host country who approve of your presence and value it.

Now you see it ... now you don't.

You don't, because pouff! some evil sorcerer has insisted it vanish, as though it had never, in fact, existed. It should not, actually, have existed, according to the laws of the land to which you have removed in your retirement dotage. For the country in question, Spain, feels its environmental and building codes should logically merge, the latter having due respect for the former. Who could possibly find fault with that?

Well, citizens of the United Kingdom who have invested their meagre remaining years in their longed-for villas, their dream homes in southern Spain, that's who. Ingrates. The first elderly couple whose villa was torn down anguishes over their lost dream of retirement in the beauty and comfort of their now-destroyed home. Living instead now, in a trailer on the site that once held their three-bedroom villa.

Destroyed, under orders of the regional government of Andalusia, which took it authoritatively upon itself to revoke a building license which had been issued by the local mayor. Thing is, it is not only the unfortunate Leonard and Helen Prior whose home was deconstructed so rudely who are now bereft of their retirement dreams. There remain some 9,999 other properties whose villas have been similarly earmarked for demolition.

Coastal properties, resort areas; thousands of property owners who had been living contentedly in their version of heaven now face the very real possibility of forced divestment. "We did everything possible to ensure that the home we bought was legal," moaned another Brit, whose beachfront home is located in Vera. "We hope that we are safe but after what happened to the Priors we just don't know. It has caused a lot of people a great deal of worry."

Yes, it most certainly would. And so, the affected foreign population has assembled to voice their outrage and their concern. "The authorities just can't go round knocking down houses as part of a political point-scoring exercise" said Angel Medine, president of Ciudadanos Eropeos, a political party whose purpose is to support foreign residents in the region. And the head of the Vera town council announced they're doing everything they can to persuade the regional authorities to pursue no further demolition orders.

Good to have nice friends, to know that your worries are theirs.