FRANCISCO VS. IAC- Easement of Way

Category: Property, Ownership and Its Modifications

FRANCISCO V. IAC- Easement of Way

An owner cannot, as respondent has done, by his own act isolate his property from a public highway and then claim an easement of way through an adjacent estate. Isolation must not be due to his own acts.

FACTS:

Ramos' Lot 860-A used to be a part of Lot 860 of the Malinta Estate owned by several co-owners.
On December 3,1947, the co-owners of Lot 860 (Cornelia and Frisca Dila) executed a deed by which an undivided 1/3 portion of the land was donated to a niece, Epifania Dila, and another undivided 1/3 portion to the children of a deceased sister, Anacleta Dila, and the remaining portion, also an undivided third, was declared to pertain exclusively to and would be retained by Cornelia Dila. A partition was then executed.

The former co-owners overlooked the fact that, by reason of the subdivision, Epifania Dila’s lot came to include the entire frontage of what used to be Lot 860 along Parada Road, and thus effectively isolated from said road the other lots, i.e., of Cornelia Dila, and of the children of Anacleta Dila.
Despit that, Cornelia sold the lot to some buyers who subsequently sold them to Ramos.
Ramos asked for a right of way through Francisco’s land but negotiations failed. Francisco's proposal for an exchange of land at the rate of 1 sq.m from him to three 3 sq.m from Ramos, as was supposedly the custom in the locality, was unacceptable to Ramos.

Later that year, Ramos succeeded was able to obtain a 3m wide passageway through Dila’s lot. Yet in August, 1973, he inexplicably put up a 10ft high concrete wall on his lot, thereby closing the very right of way granted to him across Lot 860-B. [It seems that what he wished was to have a right of passage precisely through Francisco's land, considering this to be more convenient to him, and he did not bother to keep quiet about his determination to bring suit, if necessary, to get what he wanted.]
Francisco learned of Ramos' intention and reacted by replacing the barbed-wire fence on his lot along Parada Road with a stone wall. Shortly thereafter, Francisco filed a case against him asserting his right to a legal easement.

ISSUE:

Whether or not Ramos was entitled to an easement of right of way through the land belonging to Francisco

HELD: NO

The law makes it amply clear that an owner cannot, as respondent has done, by his own act isolate his property from a public highway and then claim an easement of way through an adjacent estate. The third of the cited requisites: that the claimant of a right of way has not himself procured the isolation of his property had not been met indeed the respondent had actually brought about the contrary condition and thereby vitiated his claim to such an easement. It will not do to assert that use of the passageway through Lot 860-B was dffficult or inconvenient, the evidence being to the contrary and that it was wide enough to be traversable by even a truck, and also because it has been held that mere inconvenience attending the use of an existing right of way does not justify a claim for a similar easement in an alternative location.