The valley that I live in is slowly dying. It is sad to watch it happening, but over very many years, neglect and decay have taken their toll, and the valley now looks set to finish itself off.
Owners of property here complain about the situation, everyone wants solutions to the problems and yet somehow, something always stops the ambitions from being achieved.
We have an association of owners here, set up around thirty five years ago, with a proper constitution and articles and rules that would apply to all, designed to ensure that the valley was well maintained and treated with the proper degree of respect. The dream, back in the seventies, was to build a paradise and having made a start, the owners association was essential to ensure everything was done in exactly the right way.
The paradise was a playground for the very fortunate few, a secluded spot, hidden away in the mountains of the Sierra Cabrera, exclusive, expensive and unique.
Cortijo Grande used to be something very, very special. But it didn’t stay that way. It couldn’t stay that way.
Perhaps I should explain.
Cortijo Grande was a development that started back, way before there were owners to even think about associating. That’s a lot of years. It was a development that started, and then through a series of unwanted happenstances, just stopped, and has remained stopped, almost frozen in time, every since.
The land and the rights to develop on it, have changed hands a number of times, as developers licking their wounds, took their losses and ran, and we now have a developer, who having been severely burned by his investment here, will likely never do anything more, except, perhaps, if he is lucky, very, very lucky, get to sell the place on, to some other hapless stranger who, like his predecessor, hadn’t done his homework.
The valley’s problems are real and don’t look to be getting solved anytime soon. The whole place is mired in them, they all scream expense, and no-one wants anything to do with them.
The owners association was established, back in the day, to work to the benefit of all valley property owners and over the course of it’s many years, has done it’s best to do so, or at least, that is what I have been told.
My feeling though is that the association have only ever done as much as owners here would allow them to do, which in the event has turned out to be pretty much nothing at all. Our owners have not always worked with the best interests of the valley at heart.
Everyone claims to recognise that it will cost money to put things right. Many here though are not prepared to put their hands in their pockets to make it so, preferring instead to leave all problems, that require money to solve, with absolutely anyone other than themselves. Many here are well practiced in their excuses for not paying anything to anyone, having an armoury of arguments to produce at the vaguest whiff of needing to pull out a cheque book.
When the association committee were tasked by it’s membership with establishing a fund for maintaining and repairing the valley, they knew it was going to be tough, not least because of the excuse mentality that had developed in the valley over many years.
You see, the valley is special. There is no legal obligation for anyone in the valley to pay anything towards anything. The Spanish law under a thing called a Plan Parcial sets all owners as co-developers, who are expected to agree on what needs to be done and organise charges as appropriate, but as no-one here has a large enough stake in the valley to command any kind of majority influence, no-one can insist on anything.
I suppose I should declare an interest, at this point, as I am currently doing the secretarial role on the association committee. It’s a fascinating job, pretty much because of the people that live here, and it is interesting to see how they interact.
We have a curious demography, with a community, in just a couple of hundred villas and houses scattered around a small golf course, drawn from across europe. Very few of those that are here permanently need to work, and those few of us that do work, mostly don’t live here, using the place as a bolt-hole or getaway from an otherwise busy life.
The fact that our owners are drawn from so many different countries, with very few of them Spanish Nationals, makes life here quite difficult for the association.
Communication is problematic, English being the “common” language, but it is not clearly understood or comprehended, by many of our other nationalities. This can lead to misunderstandings, where jokes made can backfire, subtleties are lost and long words can lose an audience. Occasionally, a simple turn of phrase can mistakenly be taken as an insult. Selling any kind of argument to a diverse community like ours can be quite a challenge.
Being the association secretary here can therefore carry a lot of unexpected surprises.
But we digress. The association had been tasked with getting a fund together to maintain and repair our valley. All that was needed was a plan. It didn’t need to be too grand, but it did need to be comprehensible to our community. It also needed to be persuasive to those with short arms and deep pockets and it needed to be implemented soon.
This was our situation two years back. Next time out, I’ll explain the plan we devised. We thought it would be difficult but doable, because we thought we knew our people.
In hindsight, perhaps we should have known better.
The pebble we were planning to toss into our little pond, to solve some of our most pressing problems, was about to ripple out, and many here were about to find themselves and their true natures exposed, in ways that they would not find, in any way, comfortable. Those ripples would gain an unexpected and worrying force.
So what was this pebble that launched the tsunami? We called it the Upkeep Fund, but for some in our community, it was set to become an open declaration of war. The fun was about to begin!
Idling Man 