The empty spaces in
Andalucía, the bits between the concrete, are under threat: a resource that it
is apparently now the time to cash in on.
From the national press we
read that the President of Andalucía has approved an urban reform that allows one
to build anywhere where it is not expressly prohibited. This of course is the reverse of the old rule
that prevented building on rural undeveloped land and on specially protected
land unless it was expressly included in an urban plan. In all, 21 laws and six
decrees have been amended with the consternation of the opposition parties
within the regional parliament. Already, three appeals to the Constitutional
Court have been brought, and eighty organizations have filed a joint complaint
with the Public Ombudsman, while, say the newspapers, the decree has sparked
outrage from environmentalists everywhere.
It is nevertheless the case
that the laws needed amending (we remember the ‘300,000 illegal houses across
Andalucía’), but perhaps this U-turn is a trifle more than we had bargained
for. Will the ghastly Hotel Algarrobico in Carboneras be legalised (and can it
be repaired after a dozen years of abandon)?
What news of the hitherto
cancelled Ronda Los Merinos golf project or the Valdevaqueros Tarifa project?
The law in question is called
the LISTA, which breaks down as the Law of the Sustainability of the Territory
of Andalucía. It is designed to replace the LOUA, which, as Maura Hillen, the
ex-president of the home owners’ group AUAN recalls, was ‘…a set of regulations
that, for the last 18 years, has placed a stranglehold on development in
Andalucía with its urban-centric philosophy and a torturous planning approvals
process that failed to differentiate between a village in the Valle of Almanzora
and the city of Seville’.
The LOUA had ruled that homes
could not be built on rural ground, unless they were to be used for farming
purposes. Furthermore, municipalities could grow by not more than 4% in every
eight years. This meant that a village of fifty houses could only build two
more every eight years. And, by chance, the mayor’s brother was a builder.
So, you see, when the
foreigner turned up with a suitcase of cash, we went ahead and built an extra
house, well, converted it from an old corral really, just down past the
cemetery and not far from Paco’s Bar.
For Goodness sake, of course
they built. There’s not much money in goats these days…
The small villages were (and
still are) dying, and an injection of new residents, especially those who were
retired and would bring business to the local bar, shop and town hall
exchequer, could only be a good thing. If there were issues, the village might
need the help of a good (if crooked) lawyer, but not an environmentalist – a
city creature with a romantic and wildly inaccurate view of the lives of the
country-folk.
When Helen and Len Prior had
their home bulldozed flat in 2008 outside Vera in Almería (the other homes in
that immediate neighbourhood survived unscathed), it was neither in a
particular beauty-spot, nor was it in a flood-plain. It was at least five
kilometres from the beach as the crow flies and it wasn’t on the route of the
AVE or a motorway. It also wasn’t in a Natural Park, of which, at 2.8 million
hectares, 30.5% of the entire region, Andalucía is suitably blessed.
Where it was odd of the Junta
de Andalucía to knock-down that particular house (which, one recalls, was owned
by a foreigner), a nearby urbanisation
on the beach called Puerto Rey, which has several apartments owned by
ex-ministers from earlier democratic governments of Spain, regularly floods
with some inundations as much as three metres deep. A British woman called
Diane Dudas drowned in Puerto Rey in 2012 in such a flood. Yet, the
urbanisation has never been put at risk by meddlesome busybodies from Seville…
The ecologists (who never
seem to mind about the 75,000 hectares of plastic farms – real figures – that
do little to improve the Almerian landscape and subsoil) do have a point about
layering the whole of the Mediterranean coast in concrete. The poor villages of
the interior might need to survive with some help from outside, but the wealthy
coastal resorts are looking at expanding into their remaining fields,
salt-flats and coves for an entirely different reason: profit.
The media talks of new
schemes going ahead, with one headline saying ‘The Andalusian coast heats up
with new urban projects’. These include, ‘hotels, golf courses and
urbanisations from Chiclana to the Cabo de Gata, and not forgetting
Marbella’. The same paper, ‘El Mundo’, admits
in another leader that ‘The Andalusian government is relying on construction to
alleviate the huge losses in tourist income due to the pandemic’.
Making a profit is an
underlying philosophy of conservatism, so it comes as no surprise that the
Junta de Andalucía, reborn last year (after four decades of corrupt socialism)
as a jewel in the PP’s crown, would want to put a resource to good use. Will
the profits be re-ploughed into the local economy or find their way offshore?
Well, that’s the subject for another day.
