Our permit application in Calella de Palafrugell took fourteen weeks and went back three times. The bottleneck was not the ayuntamiento. It was the preparation.
Our permit application in Calella de Palafrugell took fourteen weeks.
Not because the town hall needed fourteen weeks to reach a decision. The dossier went back and forth three times. The approval came on the fourth submission.
That was not what we had expected. And looking back, we do not think the ayuntamiento was the bottleneck. The bottleneck was before the gate, in the preparation of the dossier.
The picture most people arrive with looks like this: the architect prepares the dossier, the town hall reviews it, a decision comes back. Linear. Predictable. Mostly a waiting game.
That is not wrong. It is incomplete.
What it leaves out is this: a permit application does not have a single continuous clock. Every time the dossier comes back for clarification, the timeline shifts. That request for clarification has a name: a requerimiento. Not a rejection, but a new review cycle. The dossier goes back, gets corrected, gets resubmitted. Then the waiting starts again.
One requerimiento adds weeks. Three of them add months.
We started with the idea that the challenge was at the ayuntamiento. Submit the dossier, wait for review, receive the permit. In practice, the challenge turned out to be elsewhere.
A permit application is not a single process. It is a sequence of rounds.
Round one: submission. The Ajuntament de Palafrugell reviews the dossier against local planning regulations and the specific requirements for the zone. If the town hall needs clarification or additional information, there is a requerimiento. The dossier goes back to the architect. Gets adjusted. Gets resubmitted. Then the waiting starts again.
This is the cycle. Not as an exception. As standard procedure.
Timing matters more than we expected. An extra requerimiento at the wrong moment can have consequences that go beyond paperwork. We only discovered that when we were already in the middle of the process.
The fourteen weeks started at the point of formal submission. But the process started four to six weeks earlier.
Architectural drawings. Technical documentation. Gathering ownership records and property descriptions. Coordinating what the architect needed and when.
That period does not count in the official timeline. But it shapes everything that follows.
Because it was in that phase that the groundwork was laid for the requerimientos that came later. Not because documents were missing. But because the different parts of the dossier did not yet fully align with each other. Individually, each part was logical. Read together, they raised questions.
That was the insight we only had in retrospect: a complete dossier is not the same as a dossier that is ready for review.
None of the three requerimientos involved major surprises or unexpected regulations.
Looking back, our timeline went roughly like this:
Week 1: first submission. Week 4: first requerimiento. Week 6: resubmission. Week 8: second requerimiento. Week 10: resubmission. Week 12: third requerimiento. Week 13: resubmission. Week 14: approval.
Not because the project changed three times. Because the dossier needed clarification three times.
They all followed the same pattern. Parts of the dossier that were clear to the architect, but raised questions for someone seeing the project for the first time. Sometimes it was something small. A description worded slightly differently from what appeared in the drawings. A detail that was self-evident to the architect but not to the reviewer. No fundamental error. But enough to trigger a new round.
Each time: a correction, a resubmission, another wait.
Looking back, the same thing came up in every round. The problem was not the application as a whole. It was the places where the dossier assumed the reader already knew what the architect knew.
Not checking whether all documents are present.
Checking whether all documents tell the same story.
That sounds like a small distinction. In practice it is the difference between a dossier that moves forward and one that needs multiple rounds.
In our case, the observations from all three requerimientos were traceable in retrospect to points that a structured cross-check before submission would have caught. Not by the person who assembled the dossier, because they are too close to it. By someone who reads it the way the town hall will: for the first time, without the context of how the project developed, looking only at what is written.
The questions that check asks: does the written description of the works match the drawings in every detail? Are decisions explained in terms a reviewer without technical expertise can follow? Are there assumptions in the dossier that were left implicit?
An architect reads a dossier technically. A town hall reads it from the perspective of regulation and completeness. An owner reads it in terms of time and outcome. Those three readings do not automatically land on the same thing. Coordination before submission is what closes the gap between them.
Not because anyone is doing their job badly. But because a complex document needs someone to read it from the outside before it goes in.
One more thing we would do differently: preliminary consultation with the town hall before formal submission. That is possible at the Ajuntament de Palafrugell. No formal process, no guarantee, but a conversation that can surface questions before they become requerimientos. We did not do this. In retrospect, it would have been worth the time.
The bottleneck was not the ayuntamiento.
It was the preparation.
That was the lesson that took fourteen weeks to learn.
Casa Connecta coordinates renovation projects on the buyer’s side in Baix Empordà. We do not build, design, or issue permits. We coordinate the process: architect, town hall timeline, documentation, and the gaps between.
→ Full guide: Renovating on the Costa Brava
If you are planning a renovation in the region, you can reach us through our Projects service.
After permit approval and completion of the works, further administrative steps may follow, including the cédula de habitabilidad.
Questions about your buying process? Email us at [email protected]. We reply within 24 hours on business days, in your language.
