Hi there,
On Friday, May 16, we returned to the house in Ourense to continue with the repairs, cleaning and painting. We had already been working on this plan for more than a month, dedicating whole weekends to get it ready.
I had already told you in a previous post that the first weekend I had an unpleasant encounter with a neighbor. She approached me to tell me that we could not park our car where we had left it, with a tone that sounded more like a warning than a suggestion. The funny thing is that she is the first one to park her car as she pleases, obstructing the public road.
Besides, both she and her husband never say hello, never say good morning, nothing.
That Friday I was cleaning the driveway when she approached me again. Margarita. She asked me if we could talk. As I already knew what was going on, I went to get the phone to record the conversation.
She told me that she had humidity in one of the walls of her house, which was coming in from “my ruin”.
When we bought this property, we bought it as a package: the house, a ruin attached to the side (four stone walls, without a roof, used to store firewood), and three small plots of land. According to her, that ruin was the cause of the dampness that had been there for years. And the solution, according to Margarita, was for us to put in a new gutter, waterproof her wall and put in a piece of ironing. All at our expense.
She clarified that she already had a lawsuit prepared, but that she had held it up to give us the opportunity to resolve it “amicably”. And that, with the former owner, Sergio, she had been exchanging burofaxes for months.
What she wrote in the burofaxes did not coincide at all with what she was telling us. In some of them she directly demanded that the ruin be completely renovated, that is, that a house be built from scratch, so that the damp would be removed. There were also a latter to mayoress of the City Council of Cenlle asking her to force him to demolish the ruin or renovate it, and to forbid him to sell the house until he solved the problem.
We told her that we would analyze it with our lawyer, ask for information from the town hall and talk to Sergio. We told her that, if it was up to us to solve it, we would do it, claiming that cost from the former owner.
Then, as if by magic, Margarita changed. She stopped being the rude neighbor and became the nicest neighbor in the world. Smiles, greetings, good morning. Even her husband, who looked like he was made of stone, greeted us enthusiastically.
Sergio, for his part, told us he wanted to meet, although he didn’t explain via WhatsApp what it was about. We told him he could come any weekend. We also submitted a request to the Cenlle City Council to find out what had happened with Margarita’s complaint, since once it had been registered, the public administration had a deadline to respond.
I started to investigate. If this lady really wants to claim something, the first thing she needs is an expert report. A technical document that establishes, with evidence, that there is humidity, how it is, where it comes from and if it is really our responsibility. She needs photos of the problem, physical evidence, and an analysis that rules out that it is not a structural problem of her property such as foundation moisture, capillarity of the materials, etc.
It is also important to know how long she has had the problem, because if it has been more than 3 years, she probably no longer have the right to claim anything from anyone.
In addition, we talked to the good neighbor. She told us that Margarita has been trying to “punish” someone for years. That this house has always had humidity, that it is a structural and old issue, and that she is simply changing her target. First, she tried to pin it on the person who renovated the house, then on Sergio, and now it’s our turn.
We are going to do things right, with all the legal knowledge on our side. If the Cenlle City Council orders us to fix the problem, we will do so, and Sergio will have to pay us.
On the other hand, if the Cenlle City Council does not agree with her, she will have to provide us with an expert report that will be evaluated by our lawyer.
On May 25 we notified Margarita that the complaint had already been filed with the Ourense County Council and that we were waiting for a response as we would do whatever the City Council ordered.
On May 28, we received a call from the mayor and the architect of the Cenlle City Council regarding the complaints we had filed. To our unpleasant surprise, neither of them had any idea about Margarita’s letter or what they were supposed to do. They told us they would send a written response.
On June 8, Margarita told us that the six-month deadline for the Cenlle City Council to respond to her was expiring in a month and that, if they did not do so, she would report them.
A little later, she told us that she had spoken to the mayor on the phone and that they would supposedly send a notification to Sergio and Susana, giving them a deadline to resolve the problem. She also told her that we had the urban plan, which stated that everything was in order with the properties we were going to acquire and that it said nothing about the complaint.
Margarita asked us to give her Sergio and Susana’s new addresses and if we could send her the urban plan that the architect had drawn up so that the mayor could see it.
We sent her the information and waited to hear how the situation would develop.
On June 13, 2025, Sergio sent us a document in which the Cenlle City Council responded to Margarita’s complaint and said that they had not found any dampness or any other problem that violated current regulations.
On June 17, 2025, we received a response from the Cenlle City Council stating that the urban planning report that had been given to us did not mention Margarita’s complaint because no proceedings had been initiated, as the complaint had no evidence or basis.
Furthermore, the document indicates that Margarita did not present any evidence or expert report on all the alleged problems. In other words, she had lied to us, as she had said that she had an expert report from the insurance company and that she had submitted it to the Council.
The Council of Cenlle washed its hands of the matter; therefore, if Margarita wanted to continue claiming for this alleged damp, she had to provide us with an expert report.
We returned from Iceland, and for the next two weekends Margarita kept talking about the same thing over and over again without giving us the expert report we had been asking for from the beginning. I was already tired because every time we ran into her, we had to waste half an hour.
Although she had always been very friendly and polite, she was wasting our time that we needed to spend working on the house.
In mid-July, she told us that she was supposedly going to file a lawsuit against the city council, which clearly hadn’t done its job or complied with the law, and against the former owners; or against us if the lawyer deemed it appropriate.
The following week, Margarita wrote to us again on WhatsApp, assuring us that the expert had already visited the property, that the situation was “very serious,” and that he would call us personally. We responded with the obvious: the expert does not have to call us; his job is to issue an expert report, and he or she can send that report themselves.
We have been asking for this report for more than two months, without receiving anything. To make matters worse, on May 16, she told us that the City Council already had the expert report along with her complaint, but the City Council itself confirmed that she only gave them the letter with the complaint, and no proof at all. Then, on July 12, she herself admitted that she still did not have any report, so she had been lying to us for two months.
Everything has been contradictory: first the complaint was against Sergio, the former owner, then against us, then she said she would report the City Council… only to later say that the City Council was right. A constant back and forth that creates confusion, weariness, and zero solutions.
From the beginning, we wanted to help her and resolve everything peacefully, aware that if the problem was real, it was the responsibility of the former owner. But what we could not continue to do was to pass on contradictory information to Sergio every day, without any evidence to back it up, especially when that expert report never existed.
Finally, we told her that if she had no intention of giving us the report, as we had been requesting for more than two months, then her lawyers should act as they saw fit. And that, when the time came, when we received that legal documentation, we would respond through the appropriate channels.
Our lawyer then sent her a letter stating that any matter related to the alleged dampness she was complaining about would have to be dealt with exclusively by his office from now on.
Around that time, we also found a receipt for a couple of delivery attempts for a letter from an insurance company, which we assumed was Margarita’s insurance company.
The logical thing would be for Margarita to pass on our lawyer’s details to her insurance company so that they could forward the communications to him, but by mid-August there was still no news of the alleged expert report or the alleged letter of inquiry.
In addition, Margarita had said that in June her builder would waterproof the part of the wall that belonged to her, which was also a lie.
In a future post, I will continue telling you how the story unfolds and whether the dampness was really the fault of our property or not.