A House of Culture provides shelter to the Civil Guard in an Alicante town due to the dilapidated state of the barracks

No one has lived in the Jacarilla Civil Guard barracks house (Alicante, 2,108 inhabitants) for years. The state of the building, with practically the entire skeleton patched up and riddled with leaks, humidity and fallen ceilings, prevented almost any activity, even administrative. The Ministry of the Interior declared it in a ruinous state, so the new municipal corporation, led by Mayor Andrés Moñino (PP), faced two losses. First, that of the Armed Institute detachment, twelve agents who provide service to 15,000 residents distributed among four neighboring towns. And second, that of the property itself, located in its main tourist attraction, the municipal gardens. So the city council decided, unanimously by the two parties represented in the plenary session, PP and PSOE, to move the Civil Guard offices to the local House of Culture, where there was hardly any movement. The talks and recitals will give way, in this way, to complaints and bureaucratic procedures. Everything, culture too, for the Homeland.

The new municipal government was formed in June, after the 28-M elections, after an Interior delegation passed through the municipality, embedded like an islet in the municipality of Orihuela and eminently agricultural. “They visited the barracks during an inspection of all the Civil Guard buildings in Spain,” declares Moñino, “and in September they notified us that it was not going to be renovated.” Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska's cabinet officially declared the barracks in ruins. Jacarilla thus lost a position in the armed institute “which also covers Bigastro, Benejúzar and the Oriola district of San Bartolomé.” Faced with the “need to keep” the brigade nearby, municipal technicians searched for a solution among their municipal departments. And they found it in the recently renovated House of Culture. Local cultural events could be organized “in the assembly hall and the library”, independent buildings, so this building, which barely housed any activity, could be transformed into offices and administrative offices for the agents.

At the end of last October, Jacarilla offered Interior his solution. And “two weeks later, we got a response,” Moñino recalls. Both the ministry and the provincial authorities of the Civil Guard accepted the offer. “They only asked us to install some dividing panels” to divide up the property, which represented “an economic investment that the municipal technical services are currently evaluating.” “The proposal was brought to a plenary session last November and was approved unanimously by the 11 councilors, six popular and five socialist. Since the beginning of this year, the modifications requested by the new occupants of the building have been carried out. And during the month of February, they will be installed, according to the mayor's forecasts.

Now they have to study what they do with the old barracks, built in 1916, and which is part of the historical complex of the municipal gardens of Jacarilla, next to “the palace of the Marquis of Fontalba and the parish church of Nuestra Señora de Belén”, before that ends up on the ground scattered in rubble. The intention is to “make a land swap with the Interior” so that the ministry transfers ownership of the building to the city council. A movement that is still in its infancy. “We have not started the procedures yet,” says Moñino, who acknowledges that once they have the documentation in order, they will need subsidies to rehabilitate the barracks. “We have a very limited budget,” he admits, “but we will use it, 'because if not , it will end up collapsing” and thus spoiling the cultural heritage and the main tourist attraction of Jacarilla.

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