According to a survey from SpanishHolidaysDirect, 44% of British holiday-makers in Spain used the internet to book their holiday, with 41% booking through friends or family and just 15% booking through a travel agent. This number is set to rise: a clear majority (52%) of 31-50 year olds used the internet to book their holidays.

It could affect more than 1100 properties

EFE reports 3,750 illegally-built homes in Mijas and the Socialist Mayor, Antonio Sánchez, says that 30% of them could be brought into legality through revision of the town’s PGOU General Urban Plan.

The Spanish film star Antonio Banderas and his wife Melanie Griffith have been ordered by planning chiefs to hand over part of their beachfront property on the Costa del Sol as part of a draconian campaign against ‘illegally’ built properties.

Over 14,000 square feet of land belonging to the couple will be seized to allow public access to the beach. The confiscated strip lies adjacent to the 40 ft swimming pool at the villa, named La Gaviota, which the Hollywood pair have used as their summer home for more than a decade.

The Aifos promoted development saw 129 apartments built on a site where plans showed 14 villas

What should have been a development of 14 villas with a built area of 1,342 square metres, in reality became a residential block of 129 apartments over 8,609 square metres. It happened in the Edificio Balcón del Golf, in the Playa Serena urbanization in Roquetas de Mar in Almería, a development promoted by the Aifos company.

The Republican soldiers were shot while trying to reach Almería after Málaga fell to Nationalist forces

A team working at a mass Civil War grave in Melegís, in Granada’s Valle del Lecrín, have recovered the remains of 18 Republican soldiers who were captured and shot as they attempted to flee towards Almería after Málaga fell to Nationalist forces in February 1937.

More than 100 British families could have lost expensive summer holidays worth an average £3,000 after booking through a defunct website, www.morairaway.com.

And the number is mounting as British-based holiday lettings websites that carried adverts for morairaway.com try to get in touch with customers who booked and paid.

The final amount involved could top £1m. Spanish police have already launched an investigation into the Malaga-based company whose website does now not work and whose telephone number is out of order.

The Guardia Civil are working in alphabetical order and are now in towns and villages beginning with ‘B’

The Guardia Civil is reported to be combing Málaga province in the search for illegally built homes.

Diario Sur reports that more than 40 agents are currently employed in the task, distributed across the various districts of the province, both inland and along the coast.

The properties are in the Axarquía, Marbella and Mijas

The Málaga provincial Government, La Diputación, together with Marbella and Mijas Town Halls, has announced plans to bring 40,000 houses built illegally into legality.

The properties include those in inland Axarquía as well as those along the coast, with the President of the Diputación, Salvador Pendón, saying on Tuesday that the illegally built property could be saved in the Axarquía, but that he did not understand why talk in the region was of ‘charging the Mayors’ when in Marbella alone the talk is of 30,000 homes being legalized.

Northern Cyprus is famous for its rugged coastline and 38 species of orchid but something much more prosaic has put it in the headlines – its property title deeds.

After Turkish forces arrived in the north in 1974, some 168,000 Greek Cypriots were resettled in the south and their land and houses were sold by the Turkish authorities. Many were bought by Britons, including Linda and David Orams from Sussex .

Estate agents gave the strongest indication yet that the housing market slump is over, reporting that the number of people looking to buy a home is at the highest level in a decade.

The research also indicated that house prices rose in May for the third successive month.

New buyer enquiries have risen every months since November and are currently climbing at the fastest pace since August 1999, according to the latest property market survey from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors.

Housing prices in Spain will fall nearly 30 percent between 2008 and 2011 before they start to recover from the collapse of a property boom, Spain’s second-largest bank BBVA said Tuesday.

In its last forecast for the sector six months ago, the bank had predicted housing prices would drop by 25 percent over the same period.

On Tuesday it forecast housing prices would fall by 10 percent this year and 12 percent in 2010.

The latest offer from a property company in Huelva province in southwestern Spain promises a free divorce lawyer to couples who buy one of their three bedroom houses for 68,000 euros (£61,000).

The deal by Geimsa realtors hopes to capitalise on the number of married couples delaying divorce proceedings because they cannot afford to set up new homes in the current economic climate.

Armed with a large dictionary, and using a lot of hand gestures, a couple were able to do up the house they had fallen in love with in southern Spain

We bought our cortijo (“farmhouse”) almost 10 years ago. After many years coming out to Spain, spending our holiday time travelling around looking for a place to buy. We found our house through an estate agent, who we stumbled on because we took a few wrong turns looking for somewhere to eat.

The number of foreclosure auctions of homes and businesses more than doubled last year in Spain, official data showed Monday, as people struggled to make mortgage payments amid the country’s worst recession in a generation.

A total of 58,686 foreclosure auctions took place last year compared to 25,943 in 2007, according to the body that oversees Spain’s judiciary, the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ).

Many investment trusts are domiciled in the Channel Islands because of lower corporation tax and more flexible regulations than in the UK. Their shares are quoted on the London and Channel Island stock exchanges, so investors worldwide can dabble in them easily.

By far the biggest sector among these trusts is commercial property. Channel Islands-based investment trusts own billions of pounds worth of offices, shopping centres and factories worldwide.

A law nationalising the Spanish coast is still claiming British victims – 20 years on

Our world just fell apart,” says Heather Taylor of the moment when she and her husband, Jeremy, discovered that the home they had bought by the beach in Spain would never belong to them. “We put all our retirement savings into this, and now we are devastated.”

The European Parliament has voted in favour of a report criticising Spanish property laws.

The report says Spanish legislation allowing developers to acquire private land below market rates breaches the European Convention on Human Rights.

MEPs were acting on complaints from Britons and other homeowners who feared their homes might be bulldozed.

MEPs say they hope the vote will increase pressure on the Spanish government to change its laws.

‘Extensive urbanisation’

The Ley de Costas has come to Mojacar. The Direccion General de Costas has published a list of some 60 individuals and companies who own property along Mojacar Playa -from Rio Aguas to Cueva del Lobo and Rambla Alfaix- who will be affected by the expropiation of the coastline (100m from high tide, I remind you).

Here’s the list of people who haven’t been officially informed of the process: BOE 10/03/09. Apart from this list there are other people who have been served the documents.

Prices are dropping on average by £94.87 a day – a decline of 17.7 per cent in the past year, according to Halifax.

The annual drop, which is based on the group’s preferred measure of comparing prices during the previous three months with the same period a year earlier, is the largest since the lender began its records in 1983.

Houses with gardens in central Barcelona are as rare as happy fund managers these days, but Mark Ellis has bucked the trend on both counts. He commutes between his London-based investment fund and his designer Barcelona haven, Calle Septimania 39, a house that stands out not just for its unexpected outdoor space – which includes a swimming pool and pool house – but its lavishly-restored modernist interiors inspired by the creations of Anton Gaudi.