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Rural land was reclassified for development, causing taxes to rise sharply, but is being reclassified as rural.

IBI is, roughly speaking, the Spanish equivalent of the British council tax, and many expats find that IBI is far lower than the council tax they're used to paying. Now residents in the Gata de Gorgos area in Alicante province (about five miles inland from Jávea) won't have to pay their bills for 2007 until their land is reclassified.

In Spain land currently has three statuses: rural, urbanisable (suitable for development) and urban. Urbanisable land is worth far more than rural land and as the rate of IBI you'll have to pay is affected by the price of your property, when the local council in the Gata area reclassified rural land as urbanisable residents found their IBI rose steeply.

The reclassification was controversial, in part because it made possible the building of 6,000 new properties, something which many local residents were also opposed to. Now 4,000,000 square metres of land will be returned to rural status, preventing it from being developed, and Suma, the body that looks after tax administration in the Valencian autonomous community (Valencia, Alicante and Castellon provinces), has delayed collecting taxes from residents in the affected area.

Story from homesworldwide.co.uk