The Supreme Court establishes that the community of neighbors cannot impose nudism in the pool

The nudist civil war in this Vera urbanization began more than five years ago, when two blocks of neighbors took their dispute to court and one of the groups, named “Natura World”, won the fight. He took control of the management of the apartments and approved some statutes in which he made it clear that his community was born “with a firm naturist-nudist vocation”. From that moment it was “essential” to go naked to be able to enter the common areas such as the pool or the gardens. In case of trying to do it dressed, he said, “the appropriate legal measures” would be adopted.

The result, as denounced by the rest of the neighbors who did not want to go naked, were conflicts of all kinds. The nudists hired security guards to prevent anyone trying to enter the pool with their swimsuit on. Some incidents ended in court with acquittals in speedy criminal trials. Finally, the affected residents brought the statutes before the courts through civil proceedings: they neither considered them valid nor did they consider them compatible with their fundamental rights.

The case of this divided nudist community has reached the first chamber of the Supreme Court after a court in Vera and the Almería Court rejected the claims of non-nudists. The judges have reviewed the contents of the minutes of the neighborhood meetings and understand, first of all, that it cannot be understood that these decisions were made validly: “The hubbub, shouting and interventions without a turn to speak, becomes a unfortunate spectacle where it became impossible to reach any agreement”, says one of the minutes.

Until now the judges of Almería who had studied the case based on the endorsement of those statutes that the Supreme Court now refuses to accept as valid. “What is clear is the impossibility of reaching an agreement of this kind,” says the high court in the first place to invalidate these statutes in an urbanization in which two openly conflicting neighborhood communities came to coexist. “The simple reading of the minutes of the community demonstrates with evidence that said statutes were not approved.”

With the Horizontal Property Law in hand, continues the Supreme Court, nudism cannot be imposed in this way in a community of neighbors and even less without a prior valid agreement. “It is not possible arbitrarily, by acts of force, through the hiring of private security services, to prevent the plaintiffs from enjoying the rights that correspond to them in the horizontal property regime over common elements if they do not practice nudism.” Nudism, continues the Supreme Court, is “a perfectly respectable and legitimate personal option, but the practice of which cannot be required without a basis for it.”

Not only does it force the nudist sector of the Almería urbanization to let their neighbors enter the pool dressed, but it also forces the community of neighbors to compensate each one with 1,000 euros. “Regarding the action for compensation for damages suffered, verified the violation of such fundamental rights, through acts of imposition, based on unapproved statutes, determines an evident moral damage, considering that the amount postulated for such concept enters into within the framework of a prudent compensation”.

The ruling leaves clear orders for the nudists of this neighborhood community: these prohibitions violated the rights of non-nudists to “equality, ideological freedom, freedom and privacy.” Any rule similar to that is “radically null” and nudists must “refrain from performing any acts that limit or disturb the right of access to access swimming pools and other common spaces due to the fact of not practicing nudism.”