After 18 years of wrangling between the Nerja Town Hall and the company that ran an old quarry, an agreement will see rusting machinery finally removed from the site.

The abandoned quarry, situated in the Barranco de Los Colmenarejos, lies in the heart of a natural park of Sierras Tejeda, Almijara y Alhama, which makes the pile of machinery an even more incongruous eyesore.

“We were going to remove it in May but the summer was already upon us, as well as the fact that the they [the Town Council] have demanded an exhaustive recovery plan, so we have agreed on October,” explained the owner of the company that held the mining rights, Orlando Rodríguez.

There was concern that recovering work, which would have involved cutting up old vehicles, could have been a fire concern had the work been carried out during the summer.

Sr. Orlando Rodríguez was locked in a legal battle with the previous Town Council lead by ex-Mayor, José Alberto Armijo, because the businessman wanted to reopen the quarry. This legal battle lasted eight years but the courts finally found in favour of the Town Hall.

The reason that the machinery is still up there was because the quarry was cordoned off by the authorities, “without proper motive,” in the opinion of the mining lease holder. He said that he had all the necessary licences and paperwork in order for the ten hectares of land with the quarry, of which only they only had a chance to process three hectares.

During the legal process, Sr. Rodríguez, applied for a licence to remove the machinery, which had cost him 200 million pesetas at the time (1m pesetas = 6,000 euros), which after all this time is only worth between 30,000 and 40,000 euros as scrap, in his calculations.

Yet, he claims, the Town Hall never bothered to respond to his request, so after decades of it sitting there, what he gets for scrap should just about cover the costs of getting it out of there.

“Never mind; let’s just get this finished for once and for all,” he concluded.

The present municipal administration says that they didn’t even know that the businessman had requested a permission during the previous administration’s period until they saw it published in the SUR newspaper in November last year – just another disagreeable surprise received after taking over the helm in June 2015.

However, hands were put to work with the leaseholder to remove the rusting machinery almost immediately, resulting in this present arrangement between the company and the Town Council.

(News: Nerja, Axarquia, Costa del Sol, Malaga, Andalucia)