The managing director of the La Laguna Urban Planning Department, santiago perezhas signed a procedure this Thursday urging the Urban Discipline Service to proceed with the subsidiary execution of the demolition of the former Neptune Hotelon the main road of Low tide.
Specifically, the demolition of the buildings that are part of the building complex is contemplated in order to eliminate landscape degradation and the source of insecurity and unhealthiness that supposes in the zone the maintenance of these constructions in the current conditions.
The diligence explains that this measure is used given the current state of deterioration of the propertyas well as the declaration of ruin file, in which different resolutions and technical reports have been filed since 2019 consisting of declaration of ruin of the buildings, orders for precautionary measures, as well as orders for subsidiary executions of the precautionary measures.
In August 2019, the City Council showed its support for the building rehabilitation project presented by the new owners. However, the document emphasizes that “in these three years the owners of the property have not proceeded with its rehabilitation, nor with its demolition, nor with the due maintenance of the precautionary measures”, with the consequent risk to security.
The cost of the demolition work, both of the building and of the old ‘bungalows’ that are part of the complex, will be borne by the Town Planning Department and then passed on to the property.
Built in 1959 and in a state of abandonment after its closure in 2007, Santiago Pérez considers that the Hotel Neptuno “has been the spitting image of decadence and resignation for many years” and recalls that the decision is motivated “after having been declared in ruins without the property having faced the task of rehabilitating or demolishing it, or presenting a project appropriate to urban planning and the principles of sustainability that should inspire the development of the area, precisely to avoid a legacy of unusable buildings, ruinous and unproductive.
“This building is the opposite image of what the municipal government has done and intends to continue doing for the future of the area,” said the councilor for Territorial Planning, who assures that the property “is generating serious health and safety problems insecurity, which also affect the living conditions of the surrounding residents”.
A benchmark in the 60s and part of the 70s
The Hotel Neptuno was in its time a reference point for the vertiginous tourist development that the coastal region of La Laguna experienced, with Bajamar and Punta del Hidalgo as the most significant examples, in the 1960s and part of the 1970s. “But it was a tourism model conceived very hastily, without a future perspective”, considers Santiago Pérez.
With the construction of the Autopista del Sur and the opening of the Reina Sofía Airport, expectations of sun and beach tourism development in the south of the island multiplied, with which the tourist destination of Bajamar and Punta del Hidalgo entered into decline.
“This is a decision that shows that the current government of La Laguna, headed by Mayor Luis Yeray Gutiérrez, is not resigned to the situation in the area,” remarks the Managing Director, who assures that with this measure “the foundations are clearly being laid for a future development of the northeast coast, basically based on the quality of the offer and, above all, on our patrimony of natural resources.”
