Torrox is planning on having its own golf course in the Playa Calaceite area; in fact the project is contained in the PGOU approved in 1992.

However, the intervening years of economic crisis and other mishaps have meant that this plan to develop over 100 hectares of land on the other side of the main road to the beach, putting a golf course and 3,157 dwellings on it, has gone nowhere. Yet, this has not stopped the Town Hall because they are fishing around for investors.

This area of the the Axarquian coast is also the planned location of a marina, which we have covered in previous articles.

The Mayor, Óscar Medina (PP), does not seem deterred by the present health crisis and its blooming economic fallout because he would like both the marina and the golf course to progress in parallel.

Working towards this end, the Town Hall has acquired the shares belonging to Calaceite Developments S. L., which had entered bankruptcy, for 400,000 euros. Thus Torrox now controls the advisory administration behind the golf-course developers.

“The best thing would be for several large investors to get behind the golf course, its housing project and the marina,” considered the Mayor.

Interestingly, the golf course land sits within the Plan de Protección del Corredor Litoral, approved by the previous socialist, Junta administration, effectively blocking the project, but now the Junta is in the hands of the PP conservatives (the same party as the Mayor of Torrox) who are rolling back this coastal-protection law designed to prevent omnivorous urban development along the coast of Andalucia.

The Junta has been able to do this thanks to a Regional Supreme Court decision in 2018 that ruled that the socialist law was defective in its processing; i.e, in how it was developed as a law.

There’s also the case of plots of land within the project that already belong to the Town Hall but which have been embargoed in connection with the Caso Barragán – a financial solution to the case has been reached where the Town Hall will pay 3.5m euros to an ex-employee of the Town Hall for unfair dismissal.

If the Playa de Calaceite Golf does come about, it will be the third in the Axarquía, joining Añoreta,(Rincón de la Victoria) and Baviera Golf (Vélez-Málaga). But there is also a fourth in the pipeline, which is the controversial one in Maro with its 680 dwellings and a luxury hotel to be built by converting the old sugar factory.

(News: Torrox, Axarquía, Costa del Sol, Malaga, Andalucia – Photo: E. Cabezas)