The Pilar de la Horadada City Council has provisionally approved the environmental assessment for the reclassification of 292,881 square meters of rustic land for the construction of 1,086 tourist homes in the Lo Monte Playa area.
The new housing development would have the capacity to take on 2,700 new inhabitants in a municipality that currently has just over 22,000 registered residents. These plots of land are located between the N-332 park road, Federico García Lorca Avenue in Mil Palmeras, Levante Avenue to the south and the coast.
The developer Santamar de la Vega justifies the reclassification on the grounds that the land ” has not been used for agricultural activities in the last 30 years and is simply wasteland with no agricultural value whatsoever. The developer also considers the area to be “degraded” and neds to be “filled in” because it is located between other established housing estates.
The investment in the urbanisation works to be carried out by Santamar, which owns 98% of the land, is estimated at 21.7 million euros. The annual outlay for the municipal coffers to cover the basic services of lighting, cleaning and maintenance of green areas is around 410,000 euros. Meanwhile, the income for the City Council from IBI is estimated at around 578,000 euros per year, in addition to the construction tax and initial fees for licences.
The proposal for land reclassification was initiated by Santamar in mid-2015. This Orihuela-based firm is developing a partial plan in San Miguel de Salinas for 2,000 homes and has other projects in Orihuela and Torrevieja to develop commercial areas, as well as promoting the Los Náufragos skyscrapers in the latter municipality.
The Pilar scheme has been denied on two previous occasions as the Generalitat Valenciana did not believe the project met the growth forecasts provided for in the current Pilar General Plan. In its first reports of 2017, it indicated that the Territorial Strategy of the Valencian Community (ETCV) was not being complied with, which limits the growth of municipalities based on the calculation of the maximum occupation of land for residential use. And it pointed out that in order to get around this limit, the municipality should simultaneously declassify developable land from the planning so that the sealing of land – what is occupied by housing and commercial areas on the total available land – could be considered sustainable.
Now the company, in its third attempt at presenting plans to the plenary session, says that it complies with the ETCV, but the proposal does not make clear to what extent it has changed its planning to comply with these provisions, without the municipality having declassified land in exchange for what is to be released. It only highlights the need to continue the process of urbanisation of the coast because it is already 70% consolidated in the rest of the area close to the plan. The procedure must now be validated by the Generalitat.