The Regulation of Growth in Spanish Mediterranean Coastal Areas

 The paper sees the urban and territorial measures that Spanish administrations, at all levels, have been adopting in keeping with Spanish urban planning legislation as having been in the main aimed at assuming, organising, fostering and in some few cases, halting urban growth. However, since the turn of the twenty-fi rst century and coinciding with the highest land consumption peaks ever experienced in Spain, the country’s Mediterranean regions have begun to implement measures to limit any further urban growth. To a greater or lesser degree and depending on the circumstances in each case, these new measures are here felt to affect municipal possibilities for classifying land for development, a thing hitherto virtually unlimited. Till then and exception made for expressly protected areas, local governments were free to classify any land that they deemed and thought fit  to be up for building grabs with hardly any limitations set upon their will to do so, were in fact fully empowered to declare all the land they wished to fi t for building as the denomination “construction available” land, contrary to that of “urban land”, was and in some communities still is a freely optional municipal decision. The paper indicates how some Mediterranean regions have now put certain limits on such discretionary powers.