The attempted demolition of El Algarrobico, the huge half-finished hotel on a beach in Carboneras, continues to turn on itself without moving towards demolition. The last legal pirouette consists of discussing whether the Town Hall has already complied with the judgment (rendered in 2016, eight years ago) which orders it to modify its PGOU to expressly indicate that this land is non-developable land with a special protection, as required by the mandate. by law since 1994.
The municipality has just declared to the Superior Court of Justice of Andalusia (TSJA) that it has done everything in its power to ensure that the El Algarrobico-El Canillar sector is not listed as developable. But the Andalusian government and environmentalists denounce that it is another ruse, to continue to delay the application of the law. “There are places where El Algarrobico continues to appear developable,” denounces José Ignacio Domínguez, lawyer for Ecologistas en Acción. This media consulted the portal of the Junta de Andalucía where the urban and territorial plans are collected, the last update of which took place this Monday, and the supposed modification made by Carboneras does not appear.
In the meantime, developer Azata del Sol has requested that the review of the building permit (still in force) be accelerated. Andalusian government sources believe that this is how it is trying to delay the process; environmentalists, who blur the land so that the permit can be revised while the land is, theoretically and only in the PGOU of Carboneras, still suitable for development. “It is very suspicious that Azata wants to move the case forward,” says Domínguez. “The rush makes me suspect that they have an agreement with the town hall and that they are able to say that the license is legal.”
“It’s incredible: we’re talking about eight years to serve a sentence,” laments the lawyer. This is a trend that has been repeated for almost two decades. The courts decide and confirm that the hotel cannot be there, but the court decisions are lost in a legal tangle to which the municipality itself contributes above all. This was governed for many years by José Luis Amérigo (PSOE, nephew of Cristóbal Fernández, who granted the license), briefly by Felipe Cayuela (PP) and, after the motion of censure in March, by Ciudadanos (Salvador Hernández), who It has only one councilor supported by the six of the PSOE, with which it is expected that it will alternate.
In his last Christmas speech, Juan Manuel Moreno, president of the Junta de Andalucía, made demolition one of the objectives of 2024. With the year almost over, Catalina García, Minister of Sustainable Development, risked that the pickaxe could enter El Algarrobico in the middle of April 2025. “The demolition could start in six months,” he said on October 15 in an interview with Canal Sur. But this screen is far away, given the slowness with which the legal phase is taking place, bogged down since on February 6, 2006, a judge ordered the work to stop.
Is this already non-developable land benefiting from special protection?
The issue of the demolition of El Algarrobico is being resolved in two separate but related proceedings. One concerns the execution of the 2016 decision (confirmed by the Supreme Court in 2018) which obliges the municipality to recognize that the land of El Algarrobico is not developable. In another, he seeks to execute the judgment (of the same day) which requires an ex officio review of the planning permit granted to the developer Azata del Sol in 2003. To date, it is still in force.
In the first of the proceedings, the question now becomes what is necessary to comply with the award. Is it sufficient to publish the plenary agreement which accepts the modification of the PGOU? Does the change itself need to be published? Does it have to be recorded in a register? All of this repeats a problem that already arose in 2019, when the council attempted to comply insufficiently. From 2021 to 2023, the question revolved around the way in which the agreement was expressed in plenary, since the government team wanted to make the impossibility of building there appear as a given, when in reality it did not. been possible since 1994. The plenary agreement was annulled.
This year, the TSJA asked the city council to “certify” once and for all compliance with the sentence. Since the summer, the question has been whether it has already been executed. The Junta de Andalucía presented a document insisting that it was obligatory to publish the corrected regulation, which extends to the plan documents, including the files. “The judgment cannot be considered executed until this publication is produced.” For their part, environmentalists stressed in September that the Town Hall “the only thing it did was to note the reference of the sentence, but it did nothing else”.
In these, the response from the consistory arrived, with delay. This is a technical document from November 13, signed by the municipal architect, which ensures that he has already done what he had to do. “It can be verified that the modification of the PGOU “in accordance with a court decision” has been published and is part of the PGOU currently in force and registered and with the diligence of an accessory annotation dated 03/13/2024 in the regional register . urban planning instruments, says the town hall in this letter, to which elDiario.es Andalucía had access.
Errors and lack of municipal secretary
This statement comes after months of dizziness. First, it recorded the modifications with errors that directly affected the El Algarrobico-El Canillar sector. There were also errors in the citations of the applicable articles, which, according to the Commission, “could influence” its necessary adaptation to the new land law (Law to promote the sustainability of the Andalusian territory, LISTA). He had to be warned by the court, which requested that the errors be corrected. The Town Hall admits them in its latest document, qualifies them as “typographical errors” and corrects them.
Then the TSJA itself had to insist twice (in July and October) to present the document, after the municipal council requested its suspension, claiming that it could not present its document because it did not had no municipal secretary. The judges rejected the excuse. It will now be up to the TSJA to say whether this has already fulfilled what its judgment of eight years ago required: that in its PGOU Carboneras classifies the land of El Algarrobico-El Canillar as non-developable land with special protection.
Promoter maneuver
In the second procedure, there are also movements which, for the moment, lead to nothing. This involves executing the judgment which orders the automatic review of the Azata del Sol license. The revision, which must be carried out by the Town Hall, may result in the declaration or not of its nullity. Ecologistas en Acción requested in April the suspension of this process, so that the license could be revised once the Algarrobico land had already been declared undevelopable in the PGOU. The fear of environmentalists is that it will be reviewed while it is still developable, and that it will be concluded that it is legal.
On July 8, the TSJA rejected the environmentalists’ claim, finding that the decision on the revision of the permit can be executed without waiting for the execution of the decision on soil classification.
Once this order was signed, it was Azata del Sol herself who insisted that the execution continue with a brief writing in which she requested her “procedural impulse”. The fact that the promoter herself requests that the permit be revised in her favor supports the hypothesis of environmentalists according to which she intends to obtain a certain benefit by reversing the logical order of the procedures. Either by having the license revised, maintaining its validity, or by positioning yourself for a future claim for compensation.
