Approval of the Law on the Regulation and Use of Land in the Balearic Islands

Approval of the Law on the Regulation and Use of Land in the Balearic Islands

Written by: Pelayo de Salvador Morell.

26/03/2014 | Real estate development and construction

Reading time: 1 minutes

Review on the approval of the Law on Land Use and Planning (LOUS) of the Balearic Islands, the first urban development law of the Balearic Islands.

On 25th March 2014, the Parliament of the Balearic Islands passed its first land law, called the Land Use and Planning Law (LOUS), but it will not come into force until 29th May 2014, the date on which the vacatio legis established in the law itself, set at two months from its publication in the BOIB, is fulfilled. Although this is not the first urban planning regulation to be developed in the Balearic Islands, the truth is that the Balearic Islands has been one of the last autonomous communities to approve its own land regulations, following the famous judgements of the Constitutional Court STC 61/1997 and STC 164/2001.

The explanatory memorandum of the regulation itself points out that it is an attempt to comprehensively regulate urban planning activity, which develops the powers in matters of urban planning legislation that the Autonomous Community has. However, as the Autonomous Community of the Balearic Islands is a community organised by island territories, the Law has not exhausted the regulatory framework to leave a wide margin for regulatory development to the various Island Councils, so that within the LOUS, there is room for different land policies, even divergent ones, while guaranteeing a common sphere of rights and duties for individuals for the entire Autonomous Community.

Likewise, the regulations themselves indicate that the regulation of uses and activities on rustic land have been excluded from it, for which reference is made to the specific regulations (among others, Law 6/1997, of 8 July, on rustic land). However, since it is the subject of this law, specific regulations have been established regarding intervention in the use of land and urban planning discipline on rural land. In addition, the LOUS includes in its Tenth Transitory Provision an extraordinary procedure for the legalization of buildings on rural land with a validity limited to 3 years, which will be analyzed in another article.

As regards the structure and specific content of the Law, the explanatory memorandum itself includes a summary of the most relevant aspects of the regulations, to which we refer.If you wish to consult the full text of the regulation, you can do so here.

We will continue to explain the main characteristics of the LOUS through various entries.