The Arona City Council and the owners of the El Mojón partial plan, in the upper area of Los Cristianos, signed the urban agreement that will put an end to almost 25 years of blocking one of the most valued land exchanges in the Archipelago.
The document establishes the conditions for the reception of the urbanization by the City Council, something unprecedented until now, and opens the door to the granting of licenses (prior technical evaluation of each one of them) to build, in an area of almost one million of square meters, fifteen private projects, including four hotels, new residential squares and commercial establishments, such as the multinationals Lidl or McDonalds. It is estimated that this area will receive an investment of around 1,000 million euros and more than 3,000 direct jobs will be created, according to municipal forecasts.
The agreement, which, as this newspaper reported, was approved last week by the meeting of the Compensation Board of the partial plan, was signed yesterday by Miguel Villarroya, president of the body that brings together the owners of the land, and Leopoldo Díaz Oda , Councilor for Town Planning of Arona. The document will now be submitted to the mandatory period of public information for its subsequent ratification in the municipal plenary session.
In addition to the private area, whose land will be used for the aforementioned accommodation, residential and commercial uses, the new urban expansion area of the municipality of Arona, which extends between Los Cristianos and the Hospital del Sur, will have two large public parks, practically finished, which will be transferred to the City Council and in which a large skate space (skateboard area) is planned, as well as a plot of land for cultural use that will be used for the Arona Arena, an infrastructure that will host congresses, concerts and great shows, among them the contests of the Carnival of Los Cristianos. In this way, the obligation established by law to cede a percentage of land to allocate it to public use is fulfilled.
The mayor of Arona, José Julián Mena, stated that “the document provides the legal certainty that investors have requested for so long and shows that we are relaunching the municipality.” For his part, the Town Planning councilor stressed that “Los Cristianos and Arona recover an opportunity to modernize and requalify their accommodation and residential offer that was lost more than 23 years ago.” Both agreed to ensure that “not only are we unemployed, but we are a municipality that has yet to write its best years.”
SETBACKS
With the signing of the agreement, the future of the El Mojón partial plan is clarified after endless controversies and bureaucratic, legal and economic setbacks over almost 25 years, including the 2008 crisis and the pandemic three years ago. The last stumbling block occurred in August 2020, when the City Council refused to accept the urbanization works, which led the property to file an appeal in court.
The arrival of Miguel Villarroya to the Presidency of the Compensation Board, in March 2021, meant a change in the strategy of the owners, who paralyzed the legal proceedings and resumed technical meetings with the City Council. A bet that has ended up paying off and that has materialized this week with the signing of the agreement.
Sources from the Compensation Board already advanced during the technical meetings that the buildable area would be limited to a third of the space and that a “friendly” architecture concept would be used, with “large spaces and green areas”.
