Land Ownership

Yesterday we woke to four strangers entering our “area” and walking up our road with a can of paint. “HOLA, BUENOS DIAS”, Maurice yells. One of them waves, and not with a very friendly face. Maurice walks over to them and they stop and tell him that they own the land next to ours and they are just going up there to see where we are building. To insure we do not infringe on their space they want to mark their property line with paint. Funny thing is that the property line has already been marked with paint, at least three times. Red, white and brown. It seems that at least every other day someone comes to our bodega claiming ownership of the land next to us. Today was just earlier than usual, 6:50am.

We have found that there are 35 people fighting over this land. No one really knows who owns it. The problem is they all want to come up on top to the “property line” and measure and make sure we are not building on “their” land. Each time someone comes to do this, they tell us their story. Well, not “us” they tell Maurice, the “Spanish speaker” of us.

We have always been concerned about “land ownership” in Mexico. We have heard horror stories of people who thought they bought land only to find out that it is not really theirs. We did all we could before we bought our property to insure it would really be ours. Then, the first trip we made back here, after we paid for the land, we drive to the site of our future dream home and found a huge FOR SALE sign on our fence. Hyperventilating is too gentle of word to describe what we were doing when we saw the sign.

Eventually we found out, through a series of phone calls and visits to real estate offices, that the sign was put on the wrong fence. EEGADS!! Talk about heart failure! Anyway, land ownership issues here are not uncommon.

A couple of hours after our morning visitors left Maurice and I are outside burning garbage. (Not the normal garbage but old wood, and palms etc) and this young guy stops. He asks Maurice if he can take some particular stones that are next to our place. Maurice tells him that they are not ours but belong to the people that own the land next to us. And, of course, he starts telling Maurice it is his grandfather’s land and the others claim it but it is really HIS families. No one else’s.

The government gave this land away 130 years ago and now, that we are building next to it, everyone seems to want it. I don’t blame them, but they had better stay away from Arriba de la Roca!! We are waiting for the day someone pulls up and tells us their great grandfather was given OUR land back in 1882 and thanks us for building them their dream home!!!