Owners of 1,750 flats on the brink of losing their swimming pools and parking areas in Benalmádena

In the 1960s the Sofico Group (Sociedad Financiera Internacional de Construcciones) was founded with a clear objective: to build, sell and rent flats on the Costa del Sol. Tourism was booming and the golden age of construction on this stretch of coastline was beginning. Everyone wanted to spend their holidays on the Costa del Sol and, if possible, to have an apartment there, and even rent it.

Over the years, Sofico ended up going bankrupt and became one of the great scandals of the last years of the Franco regime, in which high-ranking officials of the time were implicated, although none of them were prosecuted. However, the president of Sofico, Eugenio Peydró Salmerón, and his son were. The former was sentenced to nine years in prison for the crimes of forgery and fraud. But before that, Sofico built, among many other properties, the apartment buildings known as Ágata, Hércules, Iris and Águila. Four communities, located in the area of El Gamonal, in Arroyo de la Miel (Benalmádena), in which 1,750 flats are located and where as many families live.

Many years had passed before the residents of these four communities heard from Sofico again. It was in 2015 when they received a notification from the company's heirs stating that the land on which the swimming pools, gardens and car parks of these four communities were located remained the property of the company, instead of belonging to the residents who had been using and caring for them for decades.

A legal battle then began between the new Sofico and the owners, which to date has only been unpleasant for the latter. The company has obtained a favourable ruling from the judge both in the first instance and in the provincial court, and now the case is heading for the Supreme Court, where the neighbours hope to have one last chance. If they do not succeed in asserting their rights over the land, they face the loss of 2 hectares of land currently valued at twelve million euros.

This court battle has opened up another even more bloody battle, but on a different scale: that of some of the owners of these communities against the lawyers who have represented them until now, as well as against the presidents and administrators.

"The land is registered in the land registry in the name of Sofico, but there are documents that prove that the owners bought it when they purchased their homes. The problem is that the lawyers who have so far represented the four communities have not made use of these documents throughout the process," explained Bernardo Gómez Corraliza, owner of two of these flats (bought by his parents when he was still a child), a lawyer by profession and professor of civil law.

A significant number of the residents are fighting for sufficient representation to be able to convene owners' meetings and approve a change in legal representation, so that Gómez Corraliza now takes up the cause. This is not proving easy, given that many of the owners are foreigners and it is the administrators who have their contacts and proxy votes.

"In the past, many things were done in this way, the residents bought, but they did not draw up deeds, nor did they register the properties, but that does not mean that it is not theirs, the purchase documents exist. The normal thing would have been for those papers to be the first to be presented to the court, but it was not until last year that they were used and it was too late in the process," said the lawyer.

"Sofico sold the land bare, it was the residents who had to landscape it. We have been swimming in those pools for thirty years, paying lifeguards, gardeners, water and taxes, and now we are faced with this. If we don't get something in the Supreme Court we have no other choice, we will have to pay Sofico to recover the land, which is what they want, to make a profit. This is unacceptable, we are going to fight this until the end".