Thousands expatriates living on the Costas could see their homes demolished

Thousands expatriates living on the Costas could see their homes demolished after it emerged the properties had been built illegally.Administrators sent in to run the town hall at Marbella recently announced that bulldozers would almost certainly be brought in to knock down illegal buildings there. Local corruption and the flaunting of planning laws have allowed swathes of the Spanish coastline to be developed during the last decade.illegal developments being demolished years after construction. Very public trials of local officials in Spain are bringing into doubt the legality of building permits which appeared to have been properly granted. ‘Land grab’ laws have seen illegal building stopped and buyers left holding worthless paper and their deposits lost. Around 100,000 illegal homes, including one owned by a former prime minister, face demolition in Spain, according to a new prosecutor appointed to tackle building fraud and corruption.Andalucía also has the greatest number of cases of urban corruption (26), which has seen 180 people implicated and accused of various offences such as bribery, money laundering and changing the status of land illegally to permit construction in places such as Marbella.
Following Andalucía are the Canary Islands and Valencia.

Helen and Leonard Prior sold their home in Berkshire and spent £570,000 turning an area of barren scrubland into a villa with heated swimming pool and landscaped gardens.
The £570,000 villa in Vera, Almeria, complete with heated swimming pool and landscaped gardens, is reduced to rubble
They named it "Tranquilidad" in expectation of how they would spend their retirement. But yesterday, a demolition ball turned their home of the past four years to rubble.
''We were utterly powerless to stop them," said Mrs Prior, who is 64 today. "We had hoped to spend the rest of our days here but within hours everything we worked for was destroyed."
Countless Britons have been duped by unscrupulous estate agents, lawyers or property developers into purchasing homes that have been built on green belt land or without proper permission.
Last November Spain's socialist government vowed to pull down all illegally built property on 480 miles of Mediterranean coastline. The Priors, who are believed to be the first British couple to have had their villa torn down, say they did everything possible to ensure they had approval to build their home on the outskirts of Vera in the Andalusian province of Almeria.
"We used a local builder and lawyer and have documentation from the town hall giving us planning permission," said Mrs Prior.
She added: "About 18 months ago we were informed that although the local council had approved the building the regional government of Andalusia had not." After seeking legal advice they were told that although their home had been built on designated "rustic land" it would probably be allowed to remain. But on Dec 16 a policeman came to the door with a demolition order.
"Even as late as Tuesday we were reassured by our legal team that the demolition would not go ahead as it was against the Spanish constitution," Mrs Prior said. It was not until Wednesday morning when the water was disconnected followed by the electricity that the couple realised what was going to happen.
"We looked outside and saw a team of policemen - about 20 of them all armed - approaching our house alongside a team of lorries and diggers and we knew we had lost our home. We are in shock."
The couple were given two hours to remove their belongings from the house before the bulldozers moved in.Francisco Paco of Irwin Mitchell, a law firm specialising in Spanish property law, said: "Local authorities have given licences to individuals for land that should be protected.
"The buyer therefore believes that what they are doing is legal, but they later discover that the land should never have been built on."