As mentioned last month, the connection between the national corruption scandal of Caso Gürtel and the Urbanisacion Las Alminares has been taken up by the Salobreña opposition parties as an electoral WMD against the Mayor. This corruption scandal is one of the most serious cases of corruption in modern Spain and has ‘Partido Popular’ tattooed on its backside, after all.

PSOE spokesman, Gonzalo Fernández, will not let Mayor Jesús Avelino forget about it. “Something’s fishy,” the former claims. “The land upon which the urbanization was erected was destined to be primarily for a hotel, with housing to support it, and yet nowhere is a hotel to be seen, only 40 mostly unoccupied residences whose promoter is now entangled in the Gürtel case.”

The Mayor responded, “We are not police or judges. When a building permit is applied for, we analyse the submitted documents and the legality of the process, but we do not investigate the person or persons involved, we do not check to see if they have been in prison or on the moon, or where they got the money from. That’s not our job.”

To top this off, he added, “I wish Salobreña were a fiscal paradise, because the whole area would be far better off. Always respecting the law, of course!” Avelino is well known for his OTT comments such as that last one.

While with respect to Salobreña this is news, as concerns the whole of the Caso Gürtel, Los Alminares is small potatoes. Gürtel will probably take years to get to the bottom of. And the instructing judge of the case, Antonio Pedreira, will look upon Salobreña as only one more detail. But in Salobreña it’s one more political hammer to hit someone’s head with. Ouch.

Demolition is still rare in this country (Valencia excepted). And who would want to willingly tear down the attractive, finished, homes in Los Alminares?