Spanish Airport Pays for Families to Live in Peace

When the British architect Richard Rogers put the finishing touches last year on the €6.2bn (£4.21bn) development of a new terminal for Madrid's Barajas airport, it was heralded as a design masterpiece, both environment and business friendly.

But not everyone was entirely happy with the new runways at the expanded airport and the increase in air traffic.

The neighbourhood of Las Castellenas in San Fernando de Henares found their lives ruined by the noise from planes, especially during the hot Madrid summers.

Carlos Bouzón, the president of the neighborhood association, said that at their nearest point some of the flats are under a mile from the new runways.

"The worst were the jumbos," one tenant told El Mundo newspaper. "When they flew over our houses, the furniture would start to shake. The lights on the wings would light up the patios, and an incredible stench of kerosene would enter our houses."

But the 200 inhabitants of Las Castellenas are being moved, at no cost to themselves, to a new neighborhood. Between October 1 and 5, some 70 families will go to new, purpose-built flats. It has been paid for by Aena (Spanish Airports and AirSpace), the public company responsible for running Barajas and 46 other airports in Spain, and will cost €6.6m.

It was more than four years ago that Mr Bouzón and his neighbors realized that the plans for a new terminal would bring new runways right up to their doorstep. They decided that something had to be done and joined the local council to take on Aena. They challenged them according to the Spanish noise pollution law, which permits a decibel level of 65 during the day, and 55 at night, which is more or less the level of a normal conversation. With the terminal now in operation, the levels regularly reach 75 decibels in daytime and 69 at night.

It was initially thought that the houses might be soundproofed, but a study by the Aena showed that it would be impossible to do that for the whole neighborhood.

A San Fernando de Henares council spokesman said: "The project to soundproof [Las Castellenas] would have meant building a bunker. We thought that it would be better to use the money to build other houses."

Aena claims that this move will be a one-off, and that the situation in Las Castellenas is unique. However, other councils want to challenge Aena over the airport's noise.

In June, the transport ministry published a map of the noise levels around Barajas airport, but mayors in many of the towns affected by the flightpath argue that it does not correspond with reality. The councils accuse Aena of providing measurements from 2005, before the new terminal came into use, and of then predicting the potential sound levels.

The councils want Aena to provide up-to-date information on the levels of noise pollution, which they say affects 700,000 people.

Aena says that, up until June this year, it had spent €130m soundproofing some 12,671 houses.

For their part, Mr Bouzón and his neighbors could not be happier to be moving: "We never hoped for this, especially after we saw what happened in other neighborhoods in Madrid [that suffered from noise pollution]."