Almuñécar Town Hall fended off another pay out, this time for over two-million euros, claimed by the Agencia Pública de Puertos de Andalucía (APPA).

This public entity that holds sway over all ports and marinas in Andalucía, sued the Town Hall over landslips on a hillside above the Marina del Este. The APPA reasoned that it was the housing projects behind the marina that caused the landslides and not the construction of the marina.

The judicial process began in 2014, following a claim for patrimonial liability against the Town Hall and its insurance company which ended in the High Court of Justice of Andalusia (TSJA) in May this year.

The construction of the port, according to what was determined by that 2016 ruling, “caused landslides from the beginning of its construction.”

The absence of a drainage gallery built to stabilise the hillside also had a negative impact, as well as because even before housing was erected (2001) there had been a lack of maintenance of geotechnical measures; i.e., monitoring the hillside stability.

The original company that ran the Marina did carry out the maintenance but the one that took over in 2001 stopped carrying out the maintenance work, apparently.

For this reason, the High Court concluded that it was the construction of the port that caused the instability problem on the hillside and not the housing above the port. Had the housing been the problem, then as the Town Hall had issued the building licences, it would have been responsible for the problem and they would have had to cough up.

The whole Marina del Este affair is a story of squabbles between family members who had built the port, which, by the way, is legally split in half, with roughly the berths and the road belonging to one entity and the shops and offices belonging to another; in other words, a restaurant premises might belong to one landlord and its table terrace area to another.

(News/Noticias: Herradura, Costa Tropical, Granada, Andalucia)