Austrian family fight to save their home
Disputed construction project threatens their property
THE LONG battle of the Wesenauer family to save their home – the Finca Langostina in Lomas de Don Juan in Orihuela Costa - from builders has progressed to the courts following the bulldozing of their garden in July.
They are managing the legal fight from India, after becoming trapped when the coronavirus outbreak started and the country closed its borders and cancelled international flights.
According to Mrs Wesenauer, one of their maintenance workers told them on July 9 that builders with a bulldozer had attempted to get into their property but had eventually left. The Wesenauers hired a company to fence off their land and a private security guard to protect it from other attempts.
However, according to the family, this failed and their garden has now been destroyed. The Austrian couple noted that they have been living in the traditional property since 1996 ‘with all our farm animals that live free in our garden, including peacocks, chickens, cats, dog, geese and our horse Julia’. The animals had to witness the destruction of the garden, they stated.
“The builders say they can’t wait, because the court is taking too long and they have sold their houses already,” they noted. “We feel powerless because we can’t do anything from here and our animals have no protection.”
The family took the issue to Orihuela’s first tier court on
July 14 through their solicitor.
He urged the judge to take precautionary measures and evict the builder and the bulldozers from the land to protect the property from additional damage – and to launch a court investigation.
The battle started around 20 years ago, when the Wesenauers were told their land had been included in an urbanisation project named PAU-25 for which it had been divided into two different plots.
One of them is owned by the Wesenauer family, but the ownership of the other plot – which includes a large part of the garden, and a small part of the porch and property – is in dispute.
The Wesenauer family bought the property in 1996, but the PAU-25 town planning project was given the final goahead in December 2002 under the controversial LRAU land grab law, which was repealed in December 2005. Mrs Wesenauer said they appealed against the project in time, claiming it had many irregularities and that the builder ‘received the title deeds of the plot by error’.
She said they get all their basic supplies from Lomas de Don Juan urbanisation and are not part of PAU-25. The family are trying to win protected status for their home, which was built around 100 years ago.
It is ‘one of few traditional properties still standing in Orihuela Costa’ and should be preserved for future generations, they said.