Cartagena Spain, Cartagena council under fire from ecologists

 

2010-02-23

" After several decades of concreting the coastlines of Cartagena with buildings, instead of learning from their errors and putting the brakes on this savage building programme, it seems that the Town Hall are going backwards and want to build on the only virgin beach which is left between Calblanque and Cabo de Palos, Cala Reona. Its an absolute barbarity."

Harsh words from Jorge Balibrea, spokesman from the ecologist group ANSE, about the plans to rezone 60 hectares of land to enable an urbanization of between 500 and 1000 houses to be built in the bay of Cala Reona, on the edge of the Calblanque Regional Park.

 

ANSE and the Association for the defense of Cabo de Palos, (Adeca) explained that the area is currently classified as " Suelo no Urbanizable de Proteccion Ambiental, NUPA" which is land that is of environmental interest and therefore not for development, although the Town Hall, with an absolute majority,  are processing its "unprotection" in the new Plan General, albeit in a provisional form.

 

The Town hall, it would seem, wish to resuscitate a Plan parcial dating back to the 1980's, in a time when foolhardy Town Halls permitted the destruction of vast swathes of Virgin Spanish coastline, converting natural wildlife havens and their natural heritage to become concrete jungles, inhabited for the most part for the summer, and left to deteriorate into ugly, poorly maintained liabilities for the rest of the year.

At a time when more than 1 million apartments and holiday properties lie empty and rotting nationwide, it would appear to be unnecessary to construct more, destroying natural habitat in the process, particularly when the area in question contains many species which are classified as protected.

Situations like this are what many ex-pats find incomprehensible, how a piece of land can be classified as protected one minute, because of its environmental importance, then "unprotected" the next because somebody wants to build a development on it. And the situations, conversely, which have lead to many people losing their homes and lifes savings, they buy a piece of land with legal planning permission, build their home, then face its demolition because the next council comes along and says that the previous council acted illegally by re-classifying land and giving the permission in the first place.

Surely the law should be clear. Either it's protected and is of environmental importance or it's not.

And if it's protected, it should stay protected.

After all, isn't that what protecting your natural heritage is all about?

It's not as though there aren't plenty of other places an urbanization could be built , even were the council to plead that housing is needed in the area.

Which it's not.

 

The Concejal de Urbanismo, Joaquin Segado, says that there has never been a Plan Parcial in this area, and if there was, then it wasn't with a PP government, and anyway, this urbanization will be a low density development and will not impact on the Regional park of Calblanque, although ANSE and the Neighbours Association, insist that it will.

 

ANSE are determined to ensure that this piece of land should not be declared as urbanisable and has set up a Facebook site under the name of "Salvemos Calarreona"

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