It is a balmy 20C (68F) in the middle of January and George and Rita Spikings are drinking tea on their veranda. The sun is setting over the Alicante fields and the swimming pool looks inviting – but all they can think of is how to get away.

“Everyone is so scared at the moment,” says Mr Spikings, a 65-year-old Londoner. “We’re all trying to get back to England.” The Spikings are among thousands of Britons who have bought a place in the sun in recent years only to find that it was built illegally on protected land. In many cases the builders and developers who sold the home have long ago disappeared, along with the often-corrupt local officials who handed out the worthless permits.

Now many British expatriates are consumed by the fear that their dream homes could be demolished, wiping out their life savings. That has already happened to Len and Helen Prior, who last week watched their £350,000 home in Vera, AlmerÍa, reduced to rubble by a mechanical digger. At a stroke, the 63-year-old retired couple from Berkshire came to embody the fears of many of the estimated 1 million Britons who live in Spain.

The new Mayor of Catral is seeking to bring some order to the tangle of illegal development on the town’s outskirts. However, this will take time and, for owners, possibly tens of thousands of euros in additional “infrastructure charges”. Town halls must have the consent of the regional government to tackle the problem.

Until the legal deadlock is resolved, thousands of British expatriates are trapped in their Spanish homes, often unable to hook them up to the water mains because they are illegal.

“It’s ludicrous,” Mrs Spikings, 68, says. “You’re in limbo-land. We want to go back to England and we can’t sell our home because it’s illegal.”

For years successive Spanish governments turned a blind eye to rampant development. But an unprecedented construction boom in the past decade has turned swaths of the country’s once-beautiful coastline into an eyesore, a sprawl of cheap, boxy houses. According to Greenpeace, the environmental group, the coastline has been disappearing under concrete at the rate of three football pitches a day. The boom came to an abrupt halt during the past year, with prices now falling in many areas and about 40,000 Spanish estate agencies – half the total number – have closed, according to figures released this week.

At the same time, the Government and some regional authorities have started to crack down on town hall officials taking backhanders to issue permits. The entire city government of Marbella was dismissed last year, with about 50 officials being accused of running a corruption and money-laundering scam that allowed the construction of at least 30,000 illegal homes.

The Government has also begun a drive to clear the coasts of development that flouts a 20-year-old rule barring construction within 100 metres of the sea. The official in charge told The Timesthat it would be done on a case-by-case basis, “while respecting people’s rights”. “Those [buildings] that need to be demolished should be demolished,” said José Fernández Pérez, the Environment Ministry’s director for Coastal Areas. “[But] there will be no mass demolitions by the Spanish Government, however much buildings are on public land.”

It is not the only threat faced by homeowners on the coasts. Valencia, where hundreds of thousands of Britons live, has laws that have been used to seize properties for redevelopment at cut-price rates.

“This country is like Alice in Wonderland,” said Charles Svoboda, a retired Canadian diplomat who campaigns against the “Land Grab” law and other threats to homeowners. “On the surface it all looks normal, but dig a bit and pretty soon you start getting all kinds of strange things.” Many British buyers, unable to speak Spanish, rely on unscrupulous developers to guide them through the sale process. Many have used solicitors and notaries that are working with the developers to push through illegal sales.

“Everyone that you would come across in the course of a normal sale – estate agents, solicitors, government officials – none of them can be trusted,” said one woman, whose house near Catral was demolished because it had been built in a nature reserve. “That’s how we all got trapped.” She has been told that she may now also be liable for the demolition costs.

Tony Denial, 54, a construction site manager, moved to Spain on an insurance payout after being severely injured in a motorcycle accident. But, saddled with an illegal home near Catral and in the midst of a divorce, he now has to return to Britain to work for eight months a year. He designed his Spanish home himself but has halted work on it. “What’s the point of ploughing money into your home if it could be knocked down next week?”

Four years after giving up their Cambridge home, the Spikings say that they could no longer afford to buy it, even if they could sell up in Spain. What do the couple tell friends who are thinking of moving to Spain? “Don’t,” Mr Spikings says. “There’s no way to be 100 per cent certain. You can buy a home, but you can’t sell it.”

Building boom

262,000 Britons were registered as living in coastal areas of Spain or its territories in the 2006 census

105,000 of those live in Alicante, Valencia and Castellón, the provinces most affected by the legal problems

£12 billion estimated worth of UK Spanish property market in 2004-05

£160,000 average property price

84,000 second homes bought by Britons in Spain between 2000 and 2003

Sources: Times archive, Mintel

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