Closed terrace of an apartment

I bought a top floor apartment knowing that 40 years ago the previous owner closed the terrace (you wouldn´t ever know that there was a terrace in the past) - now it is just a large living room. Upon visiting the planning dept recently the technical architect told me that it is not legal to close terraces and that they have no license request on file for this work that was undertaken 40 years ago. I then checked the desciption of the property in the nota simple and realize that while the sq m correspond to what we measured, the nota simple refers to a "terrace" and we don´t have one!!!!!!

My question: as this was done over 40 years ago (when I imagine that the planning laws were different), I am wondering if we could be asked some day to remove half of our living room and make it back into a terrace?

Chloe

As Johnx says many many terraces that have been incorporated to flats are illegal, the main reason being almost invariably  that when the flats were built, the maximum constructions percentages allowed were used and for these purposes terraces and other open spaces count for 50% of the square meters towards those maximum percentages,  Enclosing the surface of the terrace would count for 100% thus exceeding the maximum percentages.

Very few Townhalls  go around checking for this and will initiate action to remove the new construction and bring the flat back to its original state and in medium to large cities this just does not happen.  The other way to initiate action is to have a neighbour or the community denouncing the ilegal constructions.  Obviously, in your case, this has not happened and it is very possible that the statute of limitations will prevent anyone (including the Townhall) from taking action since, in general, the statute of limitations runs out in 15 years.  

You should probably keep any documents, receipts, photographs, etc. that prove that the enclosure was made 40 years ago together with your Escritura and not worry too much about it specially if others in your building or compound have done the same and the community has not objected.

I bought a top floor apartment knowing that 40 years ago the previous owner closed the terrace (you wouldn´t ever know that there was a terrace in the past) - now it is just a large living room. Upon visiting the planning dept recently the technical architect told me that it is not legal to close terraces and that they have no license request on file for this work that was undertaken 40 years ago. I then checked the desciption of the property in the nota simple and realize that while the sq m correspond to what we measured, the nota simple refers to a "terrace" and we don´t have one!!!!!!

My question: as this was done over 40 years ago (when I imagine that the planning laws were different), I am wondering if we could be asked some day to remove half of our living room and make it back into a terrace?

Chloe

I bought a house with a closed in section made into another room, it should not have been, also had a more then big enough garage made in the garden, when we were all in the notary's office their was a lot of arguing going on which was related to the garage and closed in section, my solicitor then asked me if i knew about this, stupid question but their, none of this was on the deeds, i was told that if no one complained about this in 6 years then everything would be fine and is okay, this work had been done at least 6 years before i bought this house.

I owned this house for about 9 years plus, and never a word said, when i applied for the habitation certificate of course none of this was on the deeds, to get said certificate i had to have an architect around to check everything was in order, all he said was do you want this on the deeds? no, and so it wasn't.

I do not know if that's the truth about the 6 years, i never asked anyone. The house sold no problems.