The attempt to demolish El Algarrobico, the immense half-finished hotel on a beach in Carboneras, continues to circle back on itself without moving towards demolition. The latest legal pirouette consists of discussing whether the City Council has already complied with the ruling (issued in 2016, eight years ago) that orders it to modify its PGOU to expressly state that this land is non-developable land with special protection, as mandated by law since 1994.
The council has just told the Superior Court of Justice of Andalusia (TSJA) that it has done everything it had to do so that the El Algarrobico-El Canillar sector is not listed as developable. But the Andalusian Government and environmentalists denounce that it is a ruse, another one, to continue delaying compliance. “There are places where El Algarrobico continues to appear as developable,” denounces José Ignacio Domínguez, lawyer for Ecologistas en Acción. This medium has consulted the portal of the Junta de Andalucía where the urban and territorial plans are collected, the last update of which was this Monday, and the supposed modification carried out by Carboneras does not appear.
Meanwhile, the developer Azata del Sol has requested that the review of the construction license (which is still in force) be expedited. Sources from the Andalusian Government believe that this is how it tries to delay the process; the environmentalists, who muddy the land so that the license can be reviewed while the lands are, theoretically and only in the PGOU of Carboneras, still developable. “It is very suspicious that Azata wants the issue to move,” says Domínguez. “The rush makes me suspect that they have an agreement with the City Council and are capable of saying that the license is legal.”
“It is incredible: we are talking about eight years to serve a sentence,” laments the lawyer. It is a trend that has been repeated for almost two decades. The courts rule and confirm that the hotel cannot be there, but the court orders are lost in a legal tangle to which, above all, the council itself contributes. This has been 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 only has one councilor supported by the six from the PSOE, with whom it is assumed that it will alternate.
In his last Christmas speech Juan Manuel Moreno, president of the Junta de Andalucía, made the demolition one of the goals of 2024. With the year almost over, Catalina García, Minister of Sustainability, ventured that the pickaxe could enter El Algarrobico in the middle of April 2025. “Demolition could begin in six months,” he said on October 15 in an interview on Canal Sur. However, that screen is far away, given the slowness with which the judicial phase is proceeding, bogged down since on February 6, 2006, a judge ordered the stoppage of the work.
Is it already non-developable land with special protection?
The issue of the demolition of El Algarrobico is resolved in two separate, but linked, proceedings. One is about executing the 2016 ruling (confirmed by the Supreme Court in 2018) that forces the council to recognize that the El Algarrobico land is not developable. In another, it seeks to execute the ruling (of the same date) that requires ex officio review of the urban planning license granted to the developer Azata del Sol in 2003. To this day, it is still in force.
In the first of the procedures, the question now is what is needed to comply with the sentence. Is it enough to publish the Plenary agreement that agrees to the modification of the PGOU? Should the modification itself be published? Does it have to be recorded in some registry? All of this repeats an issue that already arose in 2019, when the council attempted to comply in an insufficient manner. From 2021 to 2023, the issue revolved around how the Plenary agreement was expressed, since the Government team wanted to make the impossibility of building there appear as a given, when the truth is that it has not been possible since 1994. The agreement Plenary session was annulled.
This year, the TSJA has asked the city council to “certify” once and for all compliance with the sentence. Since the summer, the question is whether it has already been executed. The Junta de Andalucía presented a document insisting that it was mandatory to publish the corrected regulations, which extends to the plan documents, including the files. “The Judgment cannot be considered executed until that publication is produced.” For their part, environmentalists pointed out in September that the City Council “the only thing it has done is note the reference of the sentence, but it has not done anything 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 compliance with a court ruling” has been published and is part of the PGOU currently in force and registered and with the diligence of accessory annotation dated 03/13/2024 in the regional registry of urban planning instruments. , says the city council in that letter, to which elDiario.es Andalucía has had access.
Errors and lack of municipal secretary
The statement comes after months of making things dizzy. First, it registered the modifications with errors that directly affected the El Algarrobico-El Canillar sector. There were also errors in the citations of the articles that applied, which, according to the Board, “could influence” its necessary adaptation to the new land law (Law to promote the sustainability of the territory of Andalusia, LISTA). He had to be warned by the court, which asked that the errors be corrected. The City Council admits them in its latest document, describes 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 City Council asked to suspend it, stating that it could not present its document because it did not have a municipal secretary. The judges rejected the excuse. Now, it will be up to the TSJA to say whether this has already fulfilled what its ruling eight years ago mandated: that in its PGOU Carboneras classify the El Algarrobico-El Canillar lands as non-developable lands with special protection.
Promoter’s maneuver
In the second procedure there are also movements that lead, for now, to nowhere. This is about executing the ruling that orders Azata del Sol’s license to be reviewed ex officio. The review, which must be carried out by the City Council, may result in its nullity being declared or not. Ecologistas en Acción requested in April the suspension of this process, so that the license could be reviewed 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 claim of the environmentalists, understanding that the ruling on the review of the license can be executed without waiting for the ruling on the classification of the soil to be executed.
Once this order was signed, it was Azata del Sol herself who urged that the execution continue with a brief writing in which she requested her “procedural impulse.” The fact that the promoter herself requests that the license be reviewed in her favor supports the environmentalists’ hypothesis that she intends to obtain some benefit by reversing the logical order of the procedures. Either by getting the license reviewed, maintaining its validity, or by positioning yourself for a future demand for compensation.
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