ARCHIVED - Lorca plans to approve the final dissolution of the Marina de Cope consortium

The mega-resort project on the coastline of Aguilas and Lorca was ruled illegal over a decade ago

The Mayor of Lorca, Diego José Mateos, has stated this week that in the full council session on Monday April 24 he expects the Marina de Cope consortium, which was formed in the early years of this century to create a huge leisure and housing development on the unspoilt coastline of southern Lorca and northern Águilas, to be finally dissolved.

It is now over ten years since Spain’s Constitutional Court ruled the Marina de Cope development illegal due to parts of the projected complex being located on protected land. This represented a major blow for the members of the consortium, which included the regional government of Murcia as well as the Town Halls of both Lorca and Águilas. Among those reported to be prepared to back the project financially was the singer Julio Iglesias, as another flagship project was launched in the Costa Cálida.

However, it is now abundantly clear that the purpose for which the consortium was formed no longer exists, and therefore that its own statutes provide for its dissolution.

When the Constitutional Court ruling was announced in December 2012 it represented a triumph for the ecological and naturalist groups who had campaigned against the macro-development, which had been declared a project of “regional interest” by the Murcia government. Other projects in the same category included the new airport at Corvera.

Marina de Cope was to include 9,000 homes, twenty hotels, six golf courses and 1,400 inland marina berths in an area of over 2,000 acres. Looking back on it now the whole idea might seem far-fetched, but this was a time before speculation brought about the collapse of the property market: other projects and ideas at the time included the Paramount park in Alhama de Murcia, a tunnel through the mountains just south of the city of Murcia to bring the AVE high-speed rail service to Corvera, and the massive Novo Carthago resort development, which also fell through due to irregularities in respect of land usage and planning permission irregularities.

Image 2: Berenguer Ingenieros