A farmer decided to plant a poplar-tree plantation on his land… near Granada Airport. The next thing he knew, he had been fined 100,000 euros.

Poplar trees, or chopos as they are called in Spanish, grow very fast and are ‘harvested’ within five years from planting so it wasn’t until they had reached a good size that they were discovered by the relevant authority: AESA (State Agency for Air Safety).

We’re talking about November 2011 when the farmer was taken to court for causing an obstacle on an approach lane and before you can say, “What chopos?” he had got the chop and handed down the 100,000-euro fine. It could have been worse, because the maximum fine for this kind of thing is 250,000 euros.

Anyway, he wasn’t happy, especially as the trees had already been harvested in July 2012; i.e., they no longer existed, when his trial came up, so he appealed against the sentence.

The provincial appeals court agreed with the farmer and overturned the fine because the AESA had been too vague over its accusation: it used a certain article in the penal code dealing with constructions obstructing flight paths, yet used the word ‘plantation.’

Anyway, between the wrong wording/law article in the prosecution terminology and the non-existence of the offending trees, the farmer was off the hook.

(News: Granada Airport, Chauchina, Granada, Andalucia)