After the local business association and the Nerja Town Hall had called upon the Junta de Andalucía to change its stance on the golf-course project the Delegate for the Provincial Council, José Luis Ruiz Espejo, promised to take the affair to the Consejería de Medio Ambiente y de Ordenación del Territorio in Sevilla; or in other words, the Junta.

The project was rejected because it clashes with the 2006 POTAX (Axarquía Territorial Development Plan)

However, despite this ‘helping hand,’ not much is expected to come of it because the Junta de Andalucía has already announced that no “substantial modifications” to the POTAX are in its agenda, as such modifications would cause “great judicial insecurity.” Besides which, such an alteration would find frontal opposition from the ecologist groups and the environmental departments.

Sr Espejo confessed that he did not possess much information on the history of the stalled ‘Barranco de la Coladilla‘ project. (Google, anybody?) but added, “I promise to sit down with the Mayor of Nerja and study possible solutions,” he insisted. Nevertheless, Sr. Espejo pointed out that regional development plans over-rule any local ones.

The Nerja golf project, included in the 2000 PGOU (Municipal Urban Development Plan) was originally seen favourably by the Junta, as did the later sale of land for 15m euros to the multinational company, Medgroup. However, three years later, in July 2006, the POTAX came into being, which invalidated the project. Medgroup took the Nerja Town Hall to court for the return of the 15m euros, but but in 2011 the case was rejected. Since then, Medgroup as appealed against this sentence.

(News: Nerja, Axarquia, Costa del Sol, Granada, Andalucia – Photo: www.ecoedam.org)