When you spend a good part of an annual budget to attract tourists and then fine them during their stay, perhaps you are going about it the wrong way.

One such faithful tourist has a second home in Torrenueva Costa and has spent his holidays with his family there for the last 40 years. The holiday accommodation, which has its own garage, is on the beachfront one-way road.

On a stay last year he received a fine for driving along the paseo on the 1st of July during the restricted period between 20.00h and 03.00h, costing him 200 euros. The trouble is that he has every right to do so in order to reach his garage. In other words, his is an ‘authorised vehicle,’ as far as accessing the paseo goes.

He pointed this out to the Torrenueva Town Hall via a letter, providing documentation to prove that he has a garage that can only be accessed via the paseo. To date, the fine still stands.

The thing is that authorised-vehicle owners must inform the Town Hall, identifying their car so that it won’t incur a fine. Owing to the delay on being notified that you have been fined, some car owners find out that they have been fined several months later, which is the case of this car owner. What we do not know is whether he had registered the car beforehand.

The Mayor, Sr Lara, assures that if they receive a complaint against a fine, they will attend to it and a reply sent.

The measure concerning the no-access to the paseo came in during 2020, when the pandemic began and was designed to give pedestrians as much space as possible so that they could maintain a safe distance. However, as is the case of the Salobreña beachfront road, it looks like that the arrangement is here to stay.

It is a fine balance between attracting tourism and maintaining order because people will try to buck the system. However, when Town Halls include traffic fines as part of their budget; i.e., they calculated that they will receive X-amount of funding through fines, then you start to question whether fines are there to help or there as a source of calculated income. Almuñécar, one year, decided that the funding to be expected from fines would increase by a certain percentage, which was highly suspicious.

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