Via Publica

It would be nice to think that during all that time in which we heard nothing from Viesgo they were steadily putting up posts and stringing electrical wire. Nice, but utterly unfounded. So when another week had gone by and we still hadn't heard anything, I gave José another call. "Oh yeah," he said, as if my voice was recalled to him from some place deep in his memory. "You need some more permissions."

It seems that the part of the route that we were told was public--and hence incorporated in the one permission we had from the ayuntamiento--is not. Or rather, it is, but there is not very much of it; the public path is only a few feet wide. As José said, "If we put the posts right down the via publica, there won't be a via publica any more." So we need permissions from the neighbors who own the land that runs alongside. All six of them.

But José said he and his partner were working on it. They already had four, and had sent letters to the other two, asking them to sign the form. One might be tempted to ask why Viesgo couldn't have done that from the beginning; why they couldn't have simply sent out forms instead of forcing us to figure out who owned what land and traipse from door to door, pen in hand. One might be tempted to ask, but one wouldn't.