Just three days after the project for Maro Golf was put on public exhibition, GENA-Ecologistas en Acción has submitted 16 objections to it.

Nerja Town Hall has signed an accord with the Sociedad Azucarera Larios (SALSA) to develop a project for 680 dwellings, hotels and a golf course in the Maro area.

The Chairman of GENA, Rafael Yus, explained that according to the documents on public display the accord intends to alter the Plan General de Ordenación Urbana (PGOU) to incorporate this tourism-leisure complex on the area of land known as the Pago de Las Mercedes by turning it into a new building-land zone.

According to Sr. Yus, the project contains formal, moral, political and judicial aspects that are unacceptable to them. They consider the idea “clearly out of date, both in its legal basis and for these times.” They consider that the Town Hall has shown negligence by presenting this project which was drawn up in 2015, with all its completion targets out of date.

The parts that the ecologists find morally inacceptable is that the accord includes debts owed by the Town Hall to Larios and the promise to recategorise the land classification of the plot; i.e., the continued existence of the former could be construed as tied to the promise of changing the land category. For this reason GENA wants all mention of public debt struck from the accord and for it to deal exclusively with the project.

There are parts of the accord that GENA find humiliating for the Town Hall as it includes a clause that allows Larios to carry out its side of the bargain depending on market prices. In other words it permits them to speculate with the price of the land once it has been recategorised.

As far as the political aspect of the accord, the ecologists question the reasoning that the Town Hall uses, claiming that Nerja needs the hotels, even when the town is at the top of the list of municipalities with the highest concentration of hotels.

The Town Hall, they consider, is offering this project as the panacea for Nerja’s problems, even when this formula has been tried countless times along the coast of Málaga with questionable success.

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