This time it wasn’t Benny that received a knuckle rapping from the Supreme Court, but the PSOE-PP coalition council from the year 2000, who the court considered had abused their municipal prerogative over minor changes to the standing PGOU.

The way the system works is that a town will draw up an urban development plan, respecting protected areas and building ratio limits etc. It is then submitted to the provincial authorities who make sure that the proposed PGOU conforms to all legal requirement and is accompanied by all necessary reports. A town needs a report from the cultural heritage department, for example, that confirms that nothing will be touched that should not be.

Once it has passed that stage it is sent back to the town for final approval after an adjustments have been included, and it is then packed off to Sevilla (Junta for the definitive approval.

Now these PGOU’s have varying life spans; i.e., are tailored to the demographic needs over ten or fifteen years, taking into account projected population growth. The trouble is that further down the line something unforeseen crops up that wasn’t obviously taken into account.

But not to panic because townships are armed with Modifaciones Puntuales (One-Off Modifications) which allows the town to literally ‘tweak’ the PGOU. If the problem cannot be rectified by one of these M.P., then a request for a PGOU revision is sent up to the provincial capital for approval – it is not necessary to rewrite the entire document.

However, the Supreme Court of the land has decided that Almuñécar under this coalition government had been abusing this minor-adjustment mechanism to radically alter the PGOU and thus avoid the revision process via Granada.

With the excuse of making more land available for hotels within the municipality, the said 2000 administration strung together no fewer than 19 such ‘tweaks’ and in some cases, encroaching on green-belt land. This cluster of modifications increased the built-up area of Almuñécar by nearly 90,000 sq/m. But there have been many more – in ten years of building madness Almuñécar processed over a hundred PM’s, leaving the original 1987 PGOU completely unrecognisable from its original form.

Anyway, the Town Hall had said in its appeal before the supreme that the Junta was trying to clip the town’s wings. The Supreme Court, however, said whilst municipalities were more than qualified to make minor adjustments to standing PGOU’s to keep it in harmony with yearly development, what amounts a major change, albeit comprising of a whole host of minor ones, was not of the town’s competence.

So, what form does this knuckle rapping take? Almuñécar has been ordered to pay the court fees – a symbolic amount of 500 euros; their Lordships know that just about every town in the land is broke.