We have an apartment, one of 29 in a community, based on a shared residential block. The apartments are arranged in three sub-blocks of 8, each sub-block with its pwn street door, plus some others with their own individual front doors. It’s about 50-50 second home owners (foreign and Spanish) and Spanish families for whom this is their only home.

To the side, outside, there is a locked gate to the stairs leading down to the communal swimming pool and sunbathing area. The eight apartments on the lowest floor have stairs down to the pool, but everyone else uses the gate.

The village we live in has a new official charged with ensuring, among other things, that pools like ours which need to be licenced comply with the regulations. Fair enough, but he’s doing this piecemeal; the pool was closed for much of 2009 while the children’s area was filled in (or it would have needed its own separate filtration unit), depth markers were painted on the sides, and so on.

Then, when we thought it was ‘legal ‘to use the pool - albeit with the children in the main part, with its deep end as well as its shallow end, instead of the much safer separate bit they had had earlier, go figure - this official announced that he would not licence the pool as we had only one toilet, and this was against the rules. So the pool was closed for the whole of 2010 while the toilet was built (which only actually took about two weeks, but there were the usual shenanigans about getting it done, and then we had to wait ages for the official to come back and inspect it all again).

At which point, he announced he still would not licence it, as there were other things needed, like a barrier all round, and so on.

He could have mentioned these before, but didn’t. We’ve lost patience, and denounced him; we must now see what happens.

However; we are spending more and more to get this pool correct. And some of the families in the block are rumbling that they never use the pool anyway, and why are we spending all this money to get nowhere, and why can’t we just fill it in?

I sympathise, but do not want to lose this pool; apart from our own amenity, I think it will hammer the value of the property.

We have a meeting coming up in a couple of weeks to approve quotes for the final(?!) works that will allow us to open the pool for Easter 2012. There is a rumour that there may be a counter-move to propose that we fill it in instead.

Up until recently, we were being assured that this could not happen without the unanimous approval of everyone in the community.

However, there is now some doubt being cast on this, and whether this could in fact be done on a majority vote, either simple, or perhaps two-thirds.

I hope someone can tell me that this is not the case, or at least how to determine if it could be the case.

I also wonder if we could avert such a proposal by threatening to sue the community for the loss in value of our property if they went ahead with such a proposal; this might make fixing the pool the cheaper option, and it seems the cheaper option usually wins.

I also understand that it would be infeasible, in law, for those families who do not want the pool to simply opt out of their share of the costs, and likewise opt out of ever using it in future. Or would it?