Does anyone know of a new Spanish law created for town halls in that ALL properties in the area must have planning permission, building regs and be completely legal?
I have been told this applies in Andalucia and all properties must be registered within 3 months or hefty fines will be imposed. The total cost including solicitor and surveyor fees is around 900 euros.
Upon completion of the legalities there will be a 3% tax paid directly to the town hall.
Apologies if this has been covered before.

Don't think that it's a new law, that has always been the case, it's just that many builers etc have just ignored it and/or thought they would get retrospective permission if it ever came up. Spanish towm halls are really feeling the pinch with austerity measures, so are looking to maximise their income. Illegal builds are an easy target. If you have a fully legal property, then you ahould have no need to worry, and should not have anything to pay.

should prove interesting - Andalucia has many thousands of illegal properties. Many of them have all normal documentation, permissions, including certificate of first habitation. And have been inspected by Town Hall and Junta, but are built on Rural land not Urban, so can never be made legal in the short to medium term, if ever. And the owners have bought them either from new or as second or third owners (they were built about 10 years ago), and normal checks show them to be "legal".

As the Junta of Andalucia know all about this, and they are responsible for allocating urban land, is where it becomes interesting - because they are actually ignoring these problem properties and allocating new land as urban/residential

as Mike says, it isn't new just that they are putting pressure on town halls to get their act together, after decades of Mayors and others taking backhanders for granting building licences and the whole "(il)legal" package.
There are many €billions of property sitting there in limbo, not just Brits, but Dutch, German, Swedes etc.

In many ways the planning regulations are the same here as in the UK.

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one of the quickest ways of checking on a property is to find it on Goozoom and the Catastral and check first the property is there, any outbuildings are shown, but more importantly - check the underlying land is Urban not Rural.
But even then Catastral isn't always accurate and homeowners have to fight hard to get it corrected.

What on earth will they do with Chiclana?

There are plenty of legal properties built on rural land. I have one, built 10 years ago with all the correct permissions and documentation.

Since the law changed in 2002 it is much more difficult to get permission to build on rural land but 10 years ago it was comparatively easy if you had a big enough plot.

The problem was that many people were persuaded to build on undersized plots and only had building permission for an agricultural building. Those building are perfectly legal, have building licences and escrituras but they will never be granted a licence of first occupation as, because they are not "viviendas" can never legally be lived in.

Nuclear test site ????

Gee thanks!! Everywhere here is now rural except in the centre of town and by the beach as the town plan was rescinded and we are now waiting for a new one. Will most likely be dead by the time that happens.

We have just got back from a week in Novo Sancti Petri

The hotel and beach were very pleasant

We spent an hour in Chiclana, just long enough to wonder at the huge differences between Southern and Northern Spain. The only polite thing I can say is it reminded us of our trip to Havana. Except the Cubans were much more presentable

You just didn´t meet me! Glad you enjoyed our beautiful beach though.

thats where it gets complicated Fred, a house on a plot of at least 1 hectare may get approval dependent on the footprint and a couple of other matters.

also the environmental people are now pulling the Junta's strings quite heavily because the waste facilities fitted do not meet current EU regulations and are causing concern about waste getting into the water table.

but there a properties with everything including first occupation that are still defined as illegal because of plot size
and as the environmentalists say, there are many "so called Naves" with swimming pools.

There was a move a couple of years ago to make such properties legal but was thrown out in court because the judge said you cannot make something legal by just backdating the law or the permissions.

see http://www.almanzora-au.org/ who have some of the best documented information
as well as http://soha.es/ amongst others

Coin has made a move to regularise the situation for 7000 houses identified
http://soha.es/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/JJ106.pdf
but they also say this will lead to a "regularised (but not fully legal) status"
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We had to have 7000m2 to build at all and even then the built size was limited. In other areas is was nearer 5000m2.

Now the rules in Andalucia are 30000m2 and even then you have to have a legally registered agricultural business to allow a vivienda on the land.

In our area I know of only one such building in the last ten years.

We got in under the wire with a month to spare!

They are still building the occasional nave though but almost certainly only by the locals who have no intention of ever selling it and even then they only use them at the weekends.

We are 230m above sea level and can see probably 100 buildings around us over a very large area. At night there is rarely any sign of habitation (lights) apart from at summer weekends.

and yet although the Ley de Costas imposes a 550m from high tide (IIRC) there are still many built up to the shore. Lampy showed them in photos in another thread.

Despite the promises there are many thousands of properties that have been built with all the permissions that are still illegal. As i have found out over the past few months. At a cost of a couple of thousand in legal expenses to prove that I can have my deposits back, even though the vendors and the estate agents have known about the situation from before they went on the market. In one case the vendor's solicitor actually told my solicitor of the true situation.
At this moment I just want to put my hands round a couple of necks, slowly tightening with a smile on my face.

Still at least you managed to get in under the line

Well you do want to live in a Turd World Country

To be fair to the rest of southern Spain - it's not like Chiclana.

(sorry Chiclanagir - the beach is very nice).