El PSOE has criticised the inaction of the Cabildo de Tenerife (CC-PP) and the Town Hall of La Orotava (CC) this Thursday regarding the reopening of Los Patos beach, which has been closed since 2023 due to potential landslides.
The socialists explain that a geological study on the cliff’s condition is needed for its reopening, and this is currently stalled. Through a press release, they express concern over the “lack of political will” from both governments to reopen Los Patos beach.
They point out that the beach was closed for a decade but was reopened during Pedro Martín’s term when the “necessary works were carried out to reopen it.”
Now, they criticise both institutions for assuming that “any solution is lost, depriving the island of one of its most emblematic natural spaces.” The socialist councillor Javier Rodríguez Medina, responsible for the Environment area in the previous term, reproaches that this issue requires technical solutions and that public resources were invested “to ensure safe access, meeting all environmental requirements, to balance the protection of the environment with the right of the people of Tenerife to enjoy it.”
Despite this, they criticise that the island’s director of the Environment, Pedro Millán, has expressed that “nature does not always have to be accessible,” which they consider “is tantamount to turning one’s back on a natural heritage that belongs to everyone.”
“We urge the Cabildo de Tenerife and the Town Hall to implement a plan. Currently, we do not know the diagnosis of the situation, nor do we know what plan these two administrations intend to follow to reopen the beach, not even a tentative date for reopening,” the socialists state.
For now, everything is stalled on a technical analysis that needs to be carried out regarding the beach. The Town Hall of La Orotava, the Coastal Demarcation, and the Environment area of the Cabildo are working on a geological study that must determine the actual state of the cliff and possible corrective measures, a study that the socialist spokesperson in La Orotava, María Jesús Alonso, denounces has “been waited on for too long.”
Alonso found it “striking to see how year after year the issue of access to our beaches remains unresolved, both on the path leading down to Bollullo and in addressing the landslides occurring at Los Patos. This requires the collaboration of a Cabildo that delays the relevant geological reports, with the complicit silence of Coalición Canaria in La Orotava, whose belligerence has been notable at other times,” she reproaches.
