Delgado v. Rodríguez Quiñones
Delgado v. Rodríguez Quiñones
Opinion of the Court
delivered the opinion of the Court.
The plaintiff and the defendant are owners, respectively, of two urban properties adjacent to each other, situated in Coll y Tosté Street of Arecibo. Each' property consists of two houses; those fronting the street are two-story buildings and those in the rear are one-story. An alley two meters wide separates plaintiff’s property from defendant’s. The houses belonging to the latter have certain openings and windows on the side abutting on plaintiff’s houses, overlooking said alley. This alley, as alleged by. plaintiff and accepted by defendant, belongs to the former. In order to compel the defendant to cover said openings and windows an action of denial of servitude was brought which was granted after a trial on the merits.
The fundamental ground on which this appeal is based is directed against the weighing of the evidence.
For purposes of clarity it is necessary to resort to the entries in the registry of property in order to learn
“Urban. Property consisting of house and lot described in its sixteenth entry, as in the present document, wherein the former house was almost totally destroyed and in its place a two-story building of reinforced concrete was erected with more or less the same area as the lot. . .”
If in 1890, when the first entry was made, the house measured 16.72 meters in front by 12.958 meters in depth “plus the regulation alley space” and in 1936 it was stated in the 16th entry that the lot had the same area as the house, and it was said that on the north which is the front, it measured 18.57 meters instead of 16.72 meters and in depth 21.46-meters instead of 12.958 meters as stated in the first entry,
The defendant lays stress on the fact that the lot is not mentioned in the first entry of plaintiff’s property, and that only the house which at that time was a two-story structure, was described. It is in the 4th entry made on October 10, 1904 that the lot is described for the first time, and which, according to that entry, measured 18.50 meters in front by 25 meters in depth.
This fact does not mean that the lot belonged to a different owner. Or, that one of the former owners of plaintiff’s house appropriated for himself a strip of land of the lot of the house which now belongs to the defendant. Several facts militate against this last hypothesis: the considerable enlargement of defendant’s house; that plaintiff’s house,
Our conclusion simplifies the problem considerably and we find it unnecessary to discuss several questions which appellant raises all of which are based on the theory that the alley was originally a part of the lot.
Appellant contends that upon describing in the complaint some of the windows which plaintiff seeks to have covered, it is not alleged that they have a direct view to plaintiff’s property. This is true, but it is also true that it is stated therein, and it was proved, that those windows were opened in the east wall of defendant’s house which extends almost parallel to the west wall of plaintiff’s house. Under these circumstances those windows necessarily have a direct or front view to plaintiff’s property, for when people use them, they hold their head in a natural straight position, in contradistinction to oblique views also called side or lateral views, where, because the windows are opened at an angle with the dividing line of the properties, they must turn their head to one side in order to use them. Manresa, Comenta-
The judgment will be affirmed.
Compare these measurements with those of the first entry;
Section 474 of the Civil Code provides:
“In order to acquire by prescription the servitudes referred to in the preceding section, the time of possession shall be counted, in positive servi-tudes, from the day on which the owner of the dominant tenement or the person who has made use of the servitude shall have begun to exert it over the servient tenement; and in negative servitudes, from the day on which the owner of the dominant tenement shall have, by a formal act, prohibited the owner of the servient tenement to execute the act which would be legal without the servitude.” (Italics ours.)
The formal or obstructive act was the letter which Fidel Sevillano wrote, on behalf of the plaintiff, to defendant requiring him to cover the openings and windows.
Case-law data current through December 31, 2025. Source: CourtListener bulk data.