The projected 7-star hotel in Almuñécar was a ‘dream too far;’ a vote catcher and, in the end, an abandoned worksite… until now, at least.

Yet, here we are in 2020, ten years after the hotel was supposed to be built, and the Town Hall plans to grant a building licence to Bahía Fenicia Residencial S. L. to cover the Peñón del Lobo with luxury dwellings rather than a hotel.

The first phase contemplates 200 ‘residential units’ built on 20,000 sq/m of hillside.

But let’s wind back a decade to 2010 when the then Mayor, Juan Carlos Benavides issued a licence to the Danish company for the much-hyped 7-star hotel, which would also come with the said 200 luxury dwellings. He was in a hurry as 2011 would be the next municipal elections.

However, the Junta threw a bucket of cold water on the project because they considered that the project was missing the necessary documentation, such as an environmental-impact study. There followed four years of to and fro between the two administrations.

Sr. Benavides had lost the elections in the meantime and the present mayor, Trinidad Herrera took up the task so when 2014 came, the Junta had finally given the green light. The cranes sprouted on the hillside, greased by a 4.7m grant from the Regional Government – it was to be, after all, the first 7-star hotel in the whole of Spain.

This time it was the Danish developer who went quiet and off the radar, or as Shakespeare would have put it: “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” In the meantime the building licence waited, faithfully, for its owner to claim it – the Town Hall could have let it expire, but they didn’t.

So, here we are in the present day and developers have handed over a million euros for the licence and preparation work is being carried out on the worksite. They missed the opportunity to obtain a state grant but the Junta one for 4.7 euros might be available once the project is completed – not before.

Editorial comment: There’s a surprise! A hotel with additional luxury dwellings ends up in just the dwellings. It’s like all those golf-course projects that come with luxury housing with only the latter materialising. It’s happened from one end of Spain to the other.

The result: a developer gets permission to build housing on an unstable hillside a-la-Carmenes, when such a development by itself would never have been permitted but as the developer waved around the promise of a mega-luxurious hotel, well that’s OK then.

What’s the betting that 20 years from now the housing is sliding down the hillside of this hitherto unspoilt section of the Almuñécar coastline and the Town Hall claims poverty, wrings its hands in anguish and tries to pass the buck on to another administration?

(News: Almunecar, Costa Tropical, Granada, Andalucia)