Spanish holiday home naturists wrong to insist on nudity, court rules
Spain’s supreme court has ruled that a group of naturist property owners at a holiday home development was wrong to insist communal areas could only be used by naked residents, and wrong to hire security guards to police access to the shared swimming pool.
The decision came after eight people in the development in the Andalucían province of Almería took legal action, claiming the enforced nudity policy violated their basic rights.
After their case was dismissed by regional courts, they decided to take it to the supreme court, which eventually found in their favour.
Although some people in the development had suggested their community had been born with “a strong naturist-nudist vocation” and that nudity was “indispensable” in communal areas such as the pool and the gardens, the judges disagreed.
They found that the pressure to follow the rules on nudism had had a deep and distressing effect on those who did not wish to practise them.
“A climate was created that was unbearable for the complainants and many other neighbours, who were hounded, coerced and discriminated against solely because they did not practise nudism,” the judges said. “Their holiday homes had gone from being a place of rest to a place of suffering.”
The supreme court ruled the lower courts had been incorrect to reject the earlier complaints after concluding that the community statutes requiring naturism to be observed in communal areas had been approved unanimously.
“This court has found a patent error in the evidence used to support that conclusion, given that a simple reading of the minutes of the community meeting clearly proves that the said statutes were not approved, and that that question was not addressed in earlier proceedings.”
The judges noted that the facts of the case went far beyond what they termed “a mere dialectical debate” and had involved the imposition of rules that gravely violated fundamental rights.
“While there had been previous attempts to impose naturism, during Holy Week 2017 the respondents hired a security company that deployed several guards at the entrance to the pool and instructed them to refuse entry to anyone who was not naked, and to expel anyone by the pool who was wearing a swimming costume,” they said.
The court granted the appeal, noting there had been no justification for the rules, which, they said, had violated the complainants’ rights to privacy and freedom of movement, as well as discriminating against their thoughts and ideas.
“As a consequence, we are granting the appeal because there was no reason to arbitrarily – through acts of force, such as hiring private security guards – stop the complainants enjoying the rights to which they are entitled in communal areas if they did not practise nudism, which, while being a perfectly legitimate and respectable personal choice, cannot be enforced without reason.”
As well as ruling that the complainants’ fundamental rights had been violated, the court ordered the complainants be paid €1,000 (£890) each in compensation for the pain and suffering they had experienced.