Spain balks at corrupt urbanization

Thousands protested urban development this weekend as concern over corruption and environmental degredation rises.

By Lisa Abend | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

from the May 7, 2007 edition

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MADRID - Ten miles north of Madrid, Jaime del Val's hometown once felt as if it was in the wilderness. "There was a lot of open land," he recalls. "It felt like you were far away from the rest of the world."

Now, shopping centers occupy the areas that Mr. del Val hiked through as a boy. Las Rozas, with 75,000 homes, is slated for 75,000 more in the next few years – mirroring a nationwide trend in Spain, which now has more second homes than any other European Union country.

That's why del Val – president of the environmental group Let's Save Las Rozas – spent Saturday afternoon, along with thousands of others across Spain, marching in protests against Spain's pervasive urban development.

In a country where economic prosperity has long rested on the construction industry, Spaniards have for decades watched as their once pristine beaches and mountains have been dotted with mega resorts and vacation homes. But spurred in part by a massive crackdown on real estate corruption last year – one that is still playing out – a growing number of citizens are concerned by Spain's urbanization. And with local elections just three weeks away, the ranks of environmentalists are swelling.

"The surprising thing isn't that the environmental movement is growing," says Jesús García, the Green Party mayoral candidate in Granada. "What's surprising is how much we're spreading into sectors that aren't normally ecology-minded."

In March, 50,000 people took to the streets of Mallorca to protest the island's "unsustainable" development. In April, courts in the province of Cantabria ordered construction stopped on a housing development after a citizens' group complained that the developer had illegally defaced a rural area. And tens of thousands protested Saturday in nearly a dozen cities .

Building boom: cure for a slump

Begun in the 1960s, Spain's building boom was spurred by a dictatorship eager for new sources of income. Mediterranean coastal towns began developing high-rise hotels and massive housing complexes that would attract foreign tourism. They were successful; today, roughly a third of the properties on the Mediterranean coast are foreign-owned.

Urban development has since spread to the interior, driven largely by an appetite for second homes. Among EU countries, Spain has the most homes per inhabitants. "Spain's population has grown 5 percent in the last decade, but housing has grown 26.3 percent," says Theo Oberhuber, coordinator for the group Ecologists in Action.

That development has created a lot of jobs and made a lot of money for some Spaniards, but it has also endangered plant and animal species, increased pollution, and reduced water supplies. A commission from the European Parliament that visited Madrid, Andalusia, and Valencia in early March, was blunt about its findings: "Too often, construction in Spain represents the plundering of a community and a culture."

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