Short answer. No. Article 698 states plainly that lapse of time cannot legalize any nuisance, whether public or private. However long a neighbor's nuisance has continued, and however long everyone stayed silent about it, the passage of time does not turn an unlawful condition into a lawful one or take away your right to seek its abatement.
What the law says
Lapse of time cannot legalize any nuisance, whether public or private.
Civil Code, Article 698 — Nuisance Never Legalized By Time. Read the full provision →
Time never cures a nuisance
Most rights and defenses in Philippine law can be gained or lost through the passage of time — that is what prescription and laches are about. Article 698 carves nuisance out of that pattern entirely. A condition that unreasonably injures health, safety, or the ordinary use of property is not gradually converted into something lawful just because it persisted for one year or twenty. Whether the nuisance is public, affecting a community, or private, affecting particular neighbors like you, the rule is the same: duration by itself changes nothing about its legal character.
Why silence does not create a right to continue
Neighbors often assume that not complaining sooner amounts to some kind of consent, and that this consent has hardened into a permanent arrangement. Article 698 rejects that reasoning as a matter of law. A nuisance is not made lawful by the neighborhood's patience, by the absence of a prior complaint, or by everyone having simply adapted to it. The person maintaining the condition does not acquire a right to keep maintaining it merely because nobody objected right away — the nuisance remains what it always was.
What this means for you now
Because time does not legalize a nuisance, the fact that the condition has gone on for years is not, by itself, a reason to give up on addressing it. You are not too late simply because you did not complain when it started. What matters is whether the condition actually meets the legal description of a nuisance — something that injures health, offends the senses, or unreasonably interferes with the use of property — not how long it has been tolerated. That assessment is worth making on its own facts rather than assumed away by the years that have passed.
What the article does not decide
Article 698 settles one question and only that one. It does not decide whether the condition you are complaining about is in fact a nuisance — that still has to be established on the facts, by showing the injury or interference the condition actually causes — and it does not tell you which remedy is open to you or how it must be pursued. In particular it is not a licence to remove or destroy the offending thing yourself. Self-help against a nuisance is hedged with conditions of its own, and a neighbour who pulls down a wall or blocks a drain without meeting them can end up answering for the damage he caused rather than being rid of the problem. The practical point is narrower than it first looks: the years that have passed are not an answer to your complaint, but neither are they, on their own, an argument for it.