Earthlog
By Charles Clover
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 04/05/2007
Charles Clover's weekly column which takes an inside look at the environment

A Spanish tragedy

Fears of a collapse in the Spanish property market have been jangling the
nerves of expat Brits and prompting speculation about whether the market
wobble could spread to Britain. What nobody has pointed out is that the
awesome over-supply of Spanish tourist homes is a social and environmental
disaster.

Spain has become the textbook case of how uncontrolled laissez-faire
economics, brought to the boil by corruption, can destroy a beautiful
country. The discipline and taste the Spanish exemplify in their dress,
style and food, the moderation they show in their drinking habits, the
planning flair exemplified by their straight roads and beautiful
architecture all desert them when it comes to governance - at least at
regional level.

All restraint seems to evaporate when confronted by an empty hillside facing
the sea. I was driving down an obscure part of the coast of Almeria last
year, one of the driest and so least developed parts of the Mediterranean
coast, when I came across a hill in the middle of nowhere being consumed by
bulldozers and cranes as if by maggots. White tourist homes with no
connection to existing settlements were sprouting out of bare rock and
scrub.

Somehow it was more shocking to come across this monumental folly, at a turn
in the road, than to drive for miles along the coastal motorway above
Marbella, where staggering sprawl, often built without planning permission
and on the proceeds of drug money, has taken over the hillsides and marched
far beyond municipal boundaries.

It couldn't happen in Britain, thanks to the town and Country Planning Act
of 1947, 60 years old this year. This said building should be within
existing settlements, wherever possible. Yet the British are hardly
blameless when it comes to wanting somewhere in the sun. We helped create
the demand that has caused the over-development of Spain. Around 250,000
homes, a third of all tourist properties in Spain, are British-owned.

To be a Spaniard with an ecological education is in Aldo Leopold's words to
live in a world of wounds. I was reporting on tuna ranching near the ancient
port of Cartagena a year ago when my contact and guide, a local
environmentalist, stopped the car to show me a rare form of pine, otherwise
found in North Africa. It lives in among the sweet-smelling herbs and low
scrub of Spain's Mediterranean coast, an arid and vanishing habitat.

Then he drove me round the rows and rows of largely empty new tourist homes,
the golf courses, shops and restaurants most with British names which are
devouring the last hillsides around La Manga del Mar Menor. As we drove back
to town, we were both seething at the philistine behaviour of my countrymen
abroad.

Suntanned expats will shrug and say over-development is confined to the
coast and to hotspots like Valencia, where the European Commission
complained in horror when corrupt developers in league with local Xunta
officials using dodgy edicts actually stole land.

That is no longer true. Thanks to new roads, funded by the EU, the tentacles
are thrusting inland. I was in Ronda, in Andalucia, the birthplace of
bullfighting, two weeks ago. The hill town has a new bypass, and within that
a whole new quarter, and there is a free-standing new dormitory town,
apparently unoccupied, on a nearby hill. In the national park, home of
griffon vultures, eagles and wild flowers, there are plans for a golf
course.

Spain - a country with 20 per cent less population than Britain - has been
building 800,000 homes a year. Britain struggles to build 200,000 and needs
to build more. But the homes Spain has built are in the wrong places, so it
is no example to follow. The homes it has built are in the south and on the
coast, when there is homelessness in Madrid.

The rape of Spain by its developers is a terrible warning to those who seek
to speed up our planning system by removing local accountability and the
right to object in principle to major developments. Spain should be required
study both for the Treasury megalomaniacs unleashed by Kate Barker and
Gordon Brown and the free marketeers of the right-wing Policy Exchange.

So far Britain, a much smaller country in size, has not gone down the same
route as Spain - except, arguably, a century or more ago. But we may be
headed in the same direction in a few years' time. New Barker-inspired
planning guidance, now in force, actively encourages building in places
where the market is overheating. Are we not in danger of doing what Spain
has done - destroying some of the places we love the most?