The law gathered the nineteenth-century ensanche, sanitation and vacant-plot statutes into a single national planning system: a hierarchy of national, provincial and municipal general plans with partial plans below them, and a classification of land into urban, urban reserve and rural. Crucially it made the right to build a function of the plan rather than an attribute of ownership, and equipped municipalities with reparcelling, compulsory purchase and municipal land banks. It also set Spain's first planning standard, requiring 10% of any planned area as parks and gardens.
This was the legal frame in which Spain absorbed the rural exodus of the 1960s and 1970s — the desarrollismo peripheries of Madrid, Barcelona and Bilbao and the Mediterranean tourist coast were all licensed under it, often by partial plans approved far ahead of any general plan. Its founding principle, that development rights derive from the plan and can be redistributed, still governs Spanish planning law and shaped Latin American statutes including Colombia's Ley 388.
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