They paved Paradise and put up a parking lot
With a pink hotel, a boutique and a swinging hotspot
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you got till it's gone... (Joni Mitchell)
The projected new by-pass for Mojácar may move the traffic along (a bit), but as more houses and hotels and bars and restaurants and apartment blocks and campsites and urbanisations and shops are built, and more zebra crossings, roundabouts, slipways, parking lots, bus-stops and traffic-lights are installed, and more people move here or visit or pass through or live or holiday or drink and eat and bathe here, and more cars, buses, motor-homes, cement-lorries, beer-trucks, motorbikes and cyclists arrive to clog up the single-lane beach road, I think the traffic will be as slow as ever.
It's going to cost the Mojácar town hall (and those who contribute towards its budget) some three million euros - apparently the banks have been asked to help. The regional government will pay the rest, some two million.
For current residents - especially in the areas where few local people live (owning land being a different concept) - a map of the planned expropriations, route, width and exits would be nice. On cue, the full plans arrived in my mail box today: here. Good news for some, but not so much for others.
The future increase in Mojácar's population, one way or another, will mean more sewage - will it continue to be spilled into the sea? Will more hills be flattened, golf courses built and Old Mojácar ransacked?
Whatever happened to the concern for that rare plant that only grows in this immediate area - the limonium estevei - also known as La Siempreviva de Mojácar? Twenty years ago, it was enough to stop the bypass altogether.
Perhaps there aren't any left now.
No comments:
Post a Comment