To cut a long story short (well a little shorter that it could be) let's fast forward to July 2007. We arrived back in San Miguel (via Sweden & Austin) on 20th to find out some bad news about our piece of land.
Real estate dealings are a little different in Mexico than New Zealand. It is not uncommon to hear stories of people who think they have purchased a property, only to discover that who they bought it from didn't actually own it!
Also when you buy a piece of land you need to put a fence around it & a sign on it saying it's yours or someone else might do that. We had been told this & thought it was too ridiculous & how could that happen, so naively didn't bother to "stake our claim".
When we got back to San Miguel we discovered that someone had done just that! They had put a "fence" (well four sticks, one in each corner, with a few strands of wire strung between them). Turns out a woman - claiming to be the wife of the old man that sold us the land, had decided that the man owed her half of the land. Yikes!!
We had a few stressful days wondering what to do, I thought we should just take the fence down, but apparently we could be arrested for that since the fence was her property! We were going to start building in the next couple of weeks & needed this sorted out first so that she could have no future claim on our land.
We headed off to Mr Sanchez (our notario/lawyer) in whom we had all faith. With the assistance of an interpreter, we were informed that she had no claim at all on the land, the vendor had listed himself as a widow (ie didnt have a wife!) & we should just go ahead in good faith...fingers crossed!
All systems go - design, design, design & then build build build...
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