Bypass ruins North East widow's dream of new life in Spain

Apr 25 2009 The Journal

A NORTH East widow’s dream of a new life in the sun has been bulldozed by Spanish planning laws.

Within months, a four-lane bypass will sweep through the front gate of Patricia Samuels’ Valencia villa.

The road will cut across the garden bringing dusty quarry trucks within metres of her swimming pool, and a mound of dirt designed to drown out the noise from traffic will block the sun from her windows.

It means the £400,000 price tag the grandmother-of-five was sitting on for her retirement will be cut by at least half – if the property is still sellable.

As a final insult developers demanded 2,000 from her to help fund local infrastructure.

The 68-year-old has fallen victim of land-grab laws, which are intended to stop foreign buyers taking over Spanish communities. But Patricia says the rules are being used push ex-pats around.

The mother-of-two and her second husband Peter bought the property, in Hondon de los Frailes, Costa Blanca, to build a new life together.

Mrs Samuels, who was born in Langley Moor, County Durham, said: “This was the perfect place for us. It was a lifelong dream come true. My family would come and stay and it was everything we wanted.

“We’ve done a lot of work on it and really made it our home. We felt so free here, but not now it’s reduced me to tears. I’m just desolate, and I don’t think it’s sunk in yet. I feel like our happy lifestyle has been shattered. It feels so wrong anyone can get away with this. I can’t bear to think how it will affect our lives.

“There’s a real community feel here. We would just pick up the phone to our friends and say ‘fancy a barbecue?’ Who’ll want to come round for a barbecue when we’ve got a bypass in our garden.”

A start-date for work on the road has yet to be fixed, but final plans, passed six weeks ago, show at where it runs through Patricia’s garden a slip-road on each side will make the bypass four lanes wide.

It forms part of the route to a marble quarry taken daily by dozens of dusty open-top trucks. Mr and Mrs Samuels expect the minimum number of lorries passing just feet from her bedroom window and sun terrace to total 90 a day.

Struggling to shift their dismay at the road, which will carve apart their home, instead of the hundreds of acres of abandoned farmland surrounding them, the couple have contacted the British authorities and appealed to the EU. So far they have had no success.

They have also had to live without electricity since December, after they were conned by a local vendor pocketing their cash instead of paying the rates on to the power company.

North East MEP Fiona Hall has been working with couple to stop their dreams being steamrollered and has backed a proposed freeze on EU funding for Spain if the authorities fail to act on the spiraling numbers of similar complaints.

She said: “Pat’s story is particularly shocking. To have developers lay roads straight through front gardens and cut off electricity for months on end and then find no help and support from Spanish authorities is horrific. Having to pay Spanish developers for this privilege is the final insult.

“For many, what was once a dream home now resembles nothing short of a building site.”