After strong wave action collapsed part of the Paseo Marítimo, it was decided to alter its layout by expropriating the sea-front area where the swimming pool and tennis courts stood.

The outgoing Mayor, María Eugenia Rufino, ordered the Auditing Department (Intervención Municipal) to make the payment of 313,000 euros.

This sum of money should bring to an end the judicial dispute between the Community Association for this double, apartment-block entity and the Town Hall; one that has dragged on since 2016. That year the lawyers representing Salomar 2000 managed to get building work stopped. Curiously, the Councillor for Urban Planning back then was the same man who has just become the Mayor of Salobreña, Javier Ortega.

However, in 2019 the Regional High Court found in favour of the Town Hall, recognising its legal capacity to make such a compulsory purchase order, and construction work recommenced. However, the price still had to be settled. The Town Hall offered 80,000 euros but Salomar 2000 wanted 700,000 euros. In the end an official body, the Comisión Provincial de Valoraciones, decided on the sum of 383,079.37 euros.

This legal action had begun at first to stop the compulsory purchase order and then once the building machinery moved in and made it a fait accompli, they fought for compensation, even though the Town Hall had offered them public land behind the blocks as compensation. In fact the land they offered in exchange was twice the area that Salomar 2000 would lose to the construction of the new Paseo Marítimo.

Salomar 2000 was built in 1970, back in the last years of the Franco regime when building regulations weren’t so ‘hot on how close to the shore you could build, which does not make the existence of Salomar 2000 any less legal.

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