ARCHIVED - Constitutional court ruling will force re-assessment of Marina de Cope urbanisation plans

The court declared amendments made to land protection status null and unconstitutional

Yesterday the Constitutional Court made a ruling which may result in the cancellation of the Marina de Cope urbanisation project destined for the coastal area between Mazarrón and Águilas.

The court declared null and unconstitutional amendments made to the Region’s Land Laws, and pronounced in favour of the claimants; environmental groups headed by the association Prolitoral , supported by the PSOE socialists, principally the parliamentary Group, in Congress, and the Ex-Minister for the environment, Cristina Narbona.

In its simplest terms, the case ( begun in 2001) related to the regional Ley del Suelo de la Región de Murcia, the regional land laws.
 11,000 hectares of protected land on the coastline between Águilas , Mazarrón and the Lorca municipality, between Cabo Cope and the Sierra de la Almenara had been reclassified, reducing its protection status from that of a regional park, to being LIC, a lower protection status which permitted a completely different range of activities within its definition.

This reclassification of the land would permit the construction of a vast leisure complex, Marina de Cope, a key strategic development project which the regional government were keen to push forward, citing the economic benefits this large scale project would bring to the region in terms of tourism revenue and job creation.

However, the project was strongly opposed by the ecological movement, who have been fighting against not only the reclassification of the land, but also the development itself ever since.

Although there have been various court cases relating to this, the ruling now effectively returns the status of the land, and the borders of various levels of classification to that which it held before 1992, and also affects other areas which were also reclassified (15,000 hectares).
Ecologists are now calling for the Marina de Cope urban project in its projected form to be cancelled definitively, a blow for the regional government and their plans for tourism development within the Region of Murcia.

The original development project included plans to build 9,000 homes and hotels with the capacity to cater for more than 20,000 guests on an area of over 21 million square metres of land between Lorca and Águilas.

However, the economic crisis and current stagnation within the construction sector make the presentation of alternative plans less likely, as the success of this kind of tourist urbanization is dependent on the expectation of demand for sales and the interest of real estate speculators, and with over 700,000 empty completed properties on the Spanish property market already, which have never even been occupied, as well as those on the re-sale market, well over a million properties in total, there is already a considerable property surplus within the Spanish construction sector.

The Regional Government of Murcia, however, have been pushing hard for this project to become a reality, Pedro Cruz referring to its potential to create tourism revenue and jobs in several of his key presentations this year.

The regional government says it is evaluating the ruling.