The company that owns the property has rented the facilities to an NGO, which will welcome foreign families who have requested protection
The NGO Accem is going to open a reception center for refugees and people at risk of social exclusion in the building that housed the old La Huertanica hotel, in Murcia. The company that owns the property has rented the facilities to the humanitarian organization, which is already carrying out the necessary reforms to open, predictably, at the beginning of next year, according to sources from the company that owns the block.
The historic building, located in the heart of the capital, on Infantes street, next to Cetina square, housed one of the most popular hotels of the last century. After its closure in 2017, it reopened as a hotel of the Bcool chain, but it was closed again. Now it will reopen its doors to accommodate fifty people at risk of social exclusion, in its five floors of about 250 square meters each. In this space, the NGO Accem will enable the rooms after managing the corresponding urban planning authorization for provisional use with the Murcia City Council.
«We are in a phase of preparing the premises, finalizing the details to start up the reception service. The people who will settle in the residence are mainly refugees from countries with conflicts such as Afghanistan and Syria, or asylum seekers from countries such as Venezuela and Colombia ”, explains Mohammed Kebaili, Accem’s territorial manager in the Region.
The NGO assures that this service has been operating in Murcia since the war in Syria broke out in 2015. The reception then took place in different hostels in the capital, until two years ago the organization had facilities in the Murcian district of Monteagudo.
“We now have about fifty seats there, but we needed more space. With this property we will be able to expand our capacity to host families seeking protection who come from refugee camps, ”Kebaili explains.
The old La Huertanica hotel will now be a transit residence, explains the Accem representative, and will temporarily host these people who have arrived in Murcia and have requested international protection at the Immigration Office or at any police station. “We provide them with legal advice and basic accommodation and food resources, while their application is processed and they are assigned a place in the international protection reception system, which is managed by the Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration”, says the representative of the NGO.
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