The Adeje Town Hall hides behind the external advice of the professor of Administrative Law of the University of La Laguna, Francisco Villar, main drafter of the Canary Islands Land Law (4/2017 of July 13), to insist that the file of the tourist complex Cradle of the Soul and the urbanization around El Puertito de Adeje is “unpolluted”, as the Councilor for Ecological Transition and Territory Management of Adeje, Manuel Luis Méndez, recalled yesterday on various radio stations, including Onda Tenerife.
In it, he replied to his counterpart in the Government of the Canary Islands, José Antonio Valbuena, that it is the autonomous Administration, in any case, which should assume eventual compensation to the promoter of Cuna del Alma.
Méndez defended the administrative acts emanating from the local Corporation regarding the processing of this project, which are “adjusted to the law” and are “endorsed by technical reports” from the house and external, including Francisco Villar’s.
Méndez considered the precautionary stoppage of the works “totally disproportionate” when the presence of the sad viborina is limited to “2% of the surface” and it is a biennial plant that has protection but is not in danger of extinction, contrary to what that counselor Valbuena argued.
The mayor of Adeje indicated that there is a “technical discussion” between the two administrations, where “the discrepancy” arises around the obligatory nature or not of a strategic environmental impact study in the urbanization project (the construction of roads, which does not of the proposed villas and hotel), which is what is authorized and was being carried out until the precautionary stoppage of the works.
In the City Council they consider that this impact study is not necessary, since the modification of the municipal planning that concerns the area of Puertito de Adeje already had this tool, mandatory in that process that Cotmac endorsed in 2018.
In that impact study, explained the councilor, all the protected species are collected and how to act in the event that “any incident” occurs, as has happened with the sad snake, which “was sighted by the company in August and was reported the presence of some 50 specimens immediately, without the Government answering how to proceed with them, until the September rains made their presence more visible,” he acknowledged.
He was surprised, because “the Ministry paralyzed the works after the complaint by Salvar La Tejita and not when the company asked them what to do with the plants.”
Méndez stressed that the urbanization of Cuna del Alma includes a section of a structural road (from Costa Adeje to Playa Paraíso, to avoid traffic from the TF-1), planned since 1986 in the Adeje subsidiary regulations, and that the legislation opens the door to the “translocation” of plants in the event of actions of public interest.
He also reported that the technicians in which the Government of the Canary Islands has relied to paralyze the works are “the same”, or at least “the fundamental ones” that in 2018 endorsed the modification of municipal planning in Cotmac are maintained.
Likewise, he advanced that the license that will be granted to the promoter to build the villas (1,800 beds instead of 3,600) and the hotel (90 rooms instead of 300) would not require an environmental impact study either, since, with the authorization of roads, the land becomes urban category.
