Yesterday, Salobreña Town Council took possession of Casa Grande up in the Casco Antiguo, which belonged to the Church but was obtained through a land-swap deal for publicly owned land near the beach

Mayor Javier Ortega and the Councillor for El Casco Antiguo, Antonio Rodríguez Molina, had a nose around the building after receiving the keys from parish priest, Padre Jorge Nieto.

The building had been standing vacant for years. In fact, the BBC used it back at the end of the 80s to film a scene from A Rose for Winter, based on the Laurie Lee novel by that same name. The photo below was taken by one of the film crew and that’s me in the centre in the short-sleeved, striped shirt, unfortunately! I had been hired as an interpreter.

Anyway, the tour of the building was also to see what state it was in but the inspections confirmed no structural damage, although it needed a cleaning blitz and quite a few licks of paint. The building is heritage protected so apart from throwing plaster at the walls, they won’t be knocking it about much, hopefully.

So what is the Church up to on its newly acquired plot? Well, they’re going to build a new church… whoopee! Mind you, that is in the future because first they are going to have to sort of the roof on the old Iglesia Ntra. Sra. del Rosario, which is closed to the public at the moment, apparently.

Returning to Casa Grande, it dates back to around 1870, and was built by a local family which was not short of a bob or two, on top of the ruins of a medieval-wall tower, which you could do at the time because… well because, if you had the right amount of dosh, you could do what you wanted… Not much changed in the respect nowadays, has it?

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

Keywords: Casa Grande Changes Hands, Town Council, Land-Swap Deal, Beach Area, New Church

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