One resident’s noise complaint silenced the bells for a year, until 84 votes brought them back. Credit: Wirestock Creators / Shutterstock
One new arrival’s plea for a good night’s sleep was enough to silence a Spanish village’s bells for a year. Now it’s gone the other way, and the village has voted, 84 to 20, to bring them back, day and night with the row over whose priorities should win still unfinished.
A newcomer’s complaint ended 46 years of ringing
In La Granja de la Costera, a village of around 300 people in the La Costera countryside of the Comunidad Valenciana, the church bells have chimed traditionally, on the hour, day and night, for 46 years. For most people who live there, it’s merely the sound the village makes, as familiar as the church itself.
About a year ago, a new arrival asked the mayor, José Miguel Marín, to do something about it. She told him the constant chiming through the night was keeping her awake, and reminded him the village already had a noise ordinance that was supposed to stop exactly this. “She came in with a complaint and reminded me we have an ordinance that bans this kind of noise,” Marín said, referring to rules the village put in place back in 2014.
The mayor had the noise measured from inside her home while the bells rang at full volume, and it came back louder than the ordinance’s 35-decibel night-time limit. So he decided to silence the automatic chime overnight, while leaving it running as normal through the day.
The vote that split a village of 300
That compromise didn’t sit well with everyone, however. Residents who’d fallen asleep to the bells their whole lives argued that one newcomer’s complaint shouldn’t be enough to rewrite a tradition older than most of them, so rather than settle it behind closed doors, the council put the question to the whole village instead.
On Monday September 21, the vote drew around a third of the village’s roughly 280 registered voters. The result ended up swaying heavily one way: 84 votes to bring the night-time chiming back in full, against just 20 to leave it restricted to daytime hours. One resident summed up the mood to Telecinco, saying the village has the best sound of any bells around, and people from outside want to take that away from them. Another was blunter still, suggesting anyone who couldn’t live with it should try a hotel somewhere quieter instead.
Why the vote never touched the actual church bells
It’s worth being clear about what was and wasn’t on the table. The vote only ever covered the automatic mechanical chime that marks the hours, not the bells rung by hand for Mass, funerals, festivals, local traditions or emergencies, which the council has said were never going to be silenced either way.
Even so, the automatic bells are enough to wear a resident down. Someone working night shifts, caring for a newborn, or just trying to sleep through a hot Spanish summer with the windows open doesn’t get much say over a bell going off every hour of the day as well as the night, and that ordinary frustration shared by many younger residents who perhaps aren’t used to the traditional bells, is what sits underneath the story that’s easy to file away as a quaint village dispute.
Spain and England have already had this exact argument, with opposite results
This isn’t the first Spanish village to have this fight, and it likely won’t be the last. In Matute, in La Rioja, a court ruling forced the night-time bells silent last year after a single resident’s complaint, and locals there said the ruling was putting an end to the customs of their villages. Spain’s public watchdog (Defensor del Pueblo) has also weighed in on a similar dispute in Palma de Gandía, ruling that town halls, not the person complaining, carry the responsibility to measure bell noise properly and act on the result, since residents have a constitutional right to a decent home in a decent environment.
England has already had the same argument, and settled it the other way. When a single complaint got 238 years of quarter-hourly night-time chimes silenced at St Peter’s Church in Sandwich, Kent, in 2017, nearly 3,500 people signed a petition to save them within weeks. Two more historic bells, at Coniston in the Lake District and Aldeburgh in Suffolk, faced similar complaints around the same time. The backlash pushed the UK government to change national planning guidance the following year, so that it’s new housing developers, not centuries-old church bells, who now have to deal with the noise when they build near an existing church.
What happens next in La Granja de la Costera
The village council is expected to formally update its own 2014 ordinance at its next plenary meeting, making the round-the-clock chiming legal again. For now, the bells are already ringing through the night exactly as they did before.
Whether a majority vote is really the fairest way to settle one person’s sleep against a whole village’s tradition is the question left still unanswered, and it’s one that plenty of Spain’s foreign residents, living somewhere quieter or louder than they expected, might quietly find themselves asking about their own street too.
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