Almuñecar Town Hall and the Provincial Council are blaming each other for a lack of progress on the Turismo Tropical complex.
The Provincial, Social Welfare Department said that they could not commit the 4.7m euros for the renovation work needed on the complex, which is on Playa San Cristóbal, not far from Chinasol.
The reason that it cannot, said Department Head, Olvido de la Rosa, was because Almuñécar had still not issued a building licence for the work, despite a year having elapsed since it was requested.
The complex used to be holiday accommodation for pensioners (24 years) until the Almuñécar Town Hall closed it in 2014 because of problems with the private company running it under a lease.
According to the provincial authorities, the Town Hall did get around to changing the land’s urban status but since then has limited itself to stalling the process. The provincial representative claims that he has met with the Mayor and the Councillor for Urban Development on several occasions, but that “despite there positive words, they have been boycotting the project.”
Meanwhile, the PP opposition party in the Provincial Council have a different opinion, which is hardly surprising as Almuñécar is governed by the PP. Delegate María Merinda Sádaba puts the whole affair down to the “incompetence and the pigheadedness” of the Provincial Council Chairperson, José Entrena.
In her opinion Sr. Entrena has deliberately driven the complex’s future on to the rocks after he announced that it was his personal goal to turn the tourist complex for pensioners into a standard hotel.
She points out that in 2017 the ruling parting announced a hotel project with great fanfare but without any legal backing; i.e., without making sure that such a move was legal, as the land was categorised as for ‘social use only’ in the municipal urban development plan (PGOU) and not for ‘hotel use only.’
“We always knew that the project was tacked together and we knew that it wasn’t going anywhere, as time has shown,” she said. She pointed out that the Provincial Council does not have the legal competence to run a hotel so when the Council put the project into motion without a building licence, they knew, in the PP, that it would founder.
Editorial comment: the problem with Spanish politics is that the Party is everything and no dissention is tolerated or offered. The party comes first and everybody else is collateral damage and fair game to gain smarty points over other political parties.
This is just another case of administrations in opposing political hands scoring points off each other rather than working for the greater good of the general public…
(News: Almunecar, Costa Tropical, Granada, Andalucia – Photo: JM de H.)