Cadiz to Cut Illegal Construction
August 28th, 2006
Illegal construction on the seafront is a “legacy from the past” that the Ministry of the Environment’s Coasts Authority is keen to lose sight of. A special programme to withdraw administrative concessions plus close collaboration with the Junta de Andalucía and local Town Halls is the formula the authority will be working with to put an end to a problem that affects the entire Spanish coastline to a certain extent.
José Fernández, director general of the Coasts Authority, recently paid a visit to Punta Candor beach in Rota (Cadiz) to supervise the the conservation work taking place in the area, classed as a natural monument. There he expressed his concern about illegal construction, which he explained collaboration between the different authorities was helping to “correct” or “redirect”. He stressed that the Junta de Andalucía, with its powers over supra-municipal planning, was able to “bring order to these somewhat wild settlements”.
He did not rule out the possibility of this “correction” process involving the demolition of illegal buildings, although he explained that wherever possible this would be done with the “consent” of the property owners affected. He stressed that it would not be sensible to continue to use illegal constructions on the coastline “especially with the threat of climate change and rising sea levels”.
On a later visit to El Palmar beach in Vejer de a Frontera, also in Cadiz, Fernández found himself face to face with a protest staged by residents from one of the areas with the highest concentration of illegal construction in the province, Zahora, in the municipality of Barbate. Representatives received the director general with placards calling for greater attention to be paid to their area by the authorities, as, they claimed, the place has been “totally neglected”.
According to a representative of the protesters, José Antonio Mármol, the local people “demand help to bring our situation to order and ask the Coasts Authority to stop some of the work it is carrying out, such as building a concrete wall on the beach where a wooden one would be much better”.
As for the protests by the people of Caños de Meca about the neglect suffered by their area, Fernández explained: “We do not have any specific information about problems in Caños and the Coasts Authority has limited resources which cannot be focused on one area alone, however we do invest a lot on a provincial level”. He went on to say that it was a question of the Town Hall contacting the authority so that “solutions can be found through good relations”.
Fernández had gone to El Palmar to see the results of the work carried out by the Ministry of the Environment there, at a cost of 5.23 million euros. This has involved the conservation of the sand dunes, with the removal of alien plant life and the planting of native species.
Improvements to the local infrastructure have also been carried out, including better access to the beach and services for the physically disabled, as well as the imminent widening of the beach with 600,000 cubic metres of sand and the installation of silica particle collectors to encourage the growth of the sandy strip.
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