Urban planning amnesty reaches large villas: Sant Josep legalizes four and three swimming pools
The Ibizan municipality has processed a dozen cases amidst the water sufficiency crisis
PalmaThe amnesty for buildings on rural land promoted two years ago by the Government continues to uncover large-scale files in Ibiza. The most notable case is currently in public information in Sant Josep de sa Talaia, where the legalization of four single-family homes, annexes, and three swimming pools on protected rural land is being processed. In the midst of a water crisis, Sant Josep is legalizing villas with swimming pools on protected land where all these activities were and are prohibited.
The extraordinary legalization has allowed the developer, the builder J. Fontalba Casado, to carry out this initiative which is being processed under the seventh additional provision of Law 7/2024, the norm known as the Urban Amnesty Law.
L'ARA Balears has located a dozen files in the case of Sant Josep alone, but these are by no means the entirety of cases being legalized, as they are only published in an accessible manner when the Directorate General of Water Resources intervenes. The cases that have been identified are those that have been submitted to the public information procedure before the Directorate General of Water Resources, because the buildings are affected by hydraulic regulations – mainly by the safety zone of the public hydraulic domain, the servitude zone, or because they affect flood-prone areas – and, therefore, require the mandatory report from this body.
The majority, with swimming pools
Even though they are illegal and located on protected rural land in most cases, the developers spared no details. 73% of the Sant Josep files processed by Water Resources correspond to homes that have a swimming pool. The sizes of the buildings being legalized also confirm what an urban planning expert – who requested anonymity for professional reasons – explained to ARA Balears a few days ago: "They absolutely do not solve the housing problem." The technical report of one of the Sant Josep legalizations refers to 485.18 square meters of buildings and a 100 square meter swimming pool, so the total area subject to legalization reaches 585.18 square meters of cement.
Just the tip of the iceberg
The scope of one of the flagship regulations of Marga Prohens' Government was picked up by the Official College of Architects of the Balearic Islands (COAIB). In its first assessment of the impact of the new regulation, corresponding to the first half of 2025, the College reported that, since the entry into force of Decree-Law 3/2024 and subsequently Law 7/2024, 1,040 extraordinary legalization projects had been submitted for visa, 571 of which corresponded to housing.
The increase has been constant. In the annual report presented in May 2026, the COAIB already placed the number of extraordinary legalization files validated during 2025 at 1,697, a figure to which it attributes a large part of the growth in construction activity registered that year.
Although the regulation prohibits legalized chalets from being used for tourist activity, experts and environmental organizations such as the GOB have assured that they will most likely be used for holiday rentals and seasonal rentals, and that in no case will these buildings serve to respond to the housing crisis. At the time, the Executive justified the rule by stating that they were entrenched irregular situations (those that still have an ongoing file cannot be legalized) and that a decision had to be made.