WHERE’S THE PARADISE WE WERE SOLD?

News

Sally Bengtsson / 2009-06-28 11:59:17

Wally says that people have to be told

Those of you who have watched “Spain, Paradise Lost” the last two Wednesday evenings on ITV will have seen Wally Tynan talking about the nightmare he has experienced since deciding to buy a home in La Zenia.

Wally popped into The Leader office last week to update us on the ongoing saga of La Zenia Elite Phase 2. The problems started when the owners of the 61 houses on the complex moved in. They were living on builders’ electricity for the first few months as Iberdrola hadn’t connected them up. When the builder left, leaving the whole urbanisation in a dire state, nothing like the pictures sold in the brochure, he owed Iberdrola 8,000 euros, which the residents agreed to pay between them, if it meant being connected to mains electricity.

However, the builder appears to have hooked them up illegally, and he was given a fine of 24,000 euros for this, which the residents are now faced with either paying or receiving no electricity whatsoever. They have lived without electricity since February 2^nd. “The whole situation leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth,” says Wally, who is the president of the complex, and says he came out to Spain to retire and take it easy, but has never worked as hard in his life as he is working now. “We are being told to pay someone else’s fine and we still have no electricity despite having paid Iberdrola 11,000 euros so far.”

Wally, in a bid to protect his investment, has been working round the clock, plastering and rendering the unfinished surfaces the builder has left on the majority of the exterior walls of La Zenia Elite 2. When he came into the office he obviously had a bad back, which is hardly surprising when it was shown how hard he had been working, in the television programme. “The 14 months I’ve been in Spain have been a living hell,” he says, resignedly. The electricity problem is not the only hazard the residents have to live with. Every time it rains hard the sewage overflows and pours out onto their streets. Wally then has to get out and sweep it away, as, he says, “when it’s dry there’s no getting it off the roads, and stench is fowl.” The Town Hall are apparently working on the problem, so hopefully the urbanisation may have one hazard less in the near future. The pool is a mosquito breeding ground, it has never been filled, and the rainwater which has collected at the bottom is a murky puddle of insect eggs and larvae.

Wally says that he knows the programme won’t do the area any good, and he wishes the story didn’t have to be told, but as he says, “People have a right to know.”

Tags: Spanish Dream, Wally Tynan, Itv Paradise Lost