The Junta de Andalucía has begun sorting out the deficiencies in the Parque Cerro del Toro in order to hand it over to Motril Town Hall.

This would effectively put an end to 14 years of the park languishing in semi-abandonment, despite it having cost huge amounts of money to set up in the first place.

The area, whose very heart are the old mines, will become a leisure and adventure park, which the Town Hall will lease out to private hands interested in mounting camp sites, hostals and bungalows.

Most of the work to get the park up and running entails cutting back all the vegetation that has encroached and the reparation of damaged installations. All this will cost around 40,000 euros. Furthermore, although the Town Hall will take on the ownership of the park, the Junta will continue to be the entity responsible for the access roads and the public land around it (La Nacla since it was expropriated in 1963).

It was in 2011 that the conversion of 225 hectares of hillside was completed with the Junta spending 4.5m euros on it. A total of 80,000 trees and shrubs were planted and the park was equipped with public rest rooms. The Town Hall had the task of setting up a mining museum, costing over half a million euros.

But then the Junta and the Town Hall fell out around 2012, unable to decide who would be running it, and the park, lacking maintenance, crumbled.

In 2020, however, with both the Junta and the Town Hall run by the same party, they kissed and made up, sort of thing… but then came along Covid.

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