The document signed by the head of the Provincial Coastal Service, Jorge Miguel Ortega, informs those affected that it is a file “for the ex officio recovery of the public domain occupied by you. In the same it grants a period of eight days to “appear, formulate a brief of allegations and present the evidence that they deem convenient for their defense.” The General Directorate of the Coast and the Sea warns that if it does not do so, or in the event that the contributions of the neighbors are rejected, “the necessary measures will be adopted for the recovery of possession of the occupied public domain through subsidiary enforcement.”
Bajo la Cuesta is a settlement located at the foot of the cliff between kilometers 12 and 13 of the Autopista del Sur, of which it occupies about 600 meters of lines next to the sea and next to the Las Caletillas power station. In 2008, the General Directorate of Coasts informed the residents of the beginning of the procedures for the recovery of possession and the disappearance of the neighborhood. In July 2016, the Supreme Court (TS) ratified a previous ruling of the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands (TSJC), which determined the practical equivalence between the boundaries established for this enclave in 2006 and before 1969. Therefore, the 49 homes that make up this town became public domain, so that they acquired the category of out of order.
About thirty neighbors were those who presented the appeal to the Supreme with the argument that, although the geomorphological conditions of Bajo la Cuesta had not changed, the legal concept of what is a maritime-terrestrial zone did with respect to the month of January 1969. Therefore, the neighbors defended, unsuccessfully, that the land could not have the status of public according to an “old” law, dating from 1880, which was the one that was applied in the demarcation of the late sixties of the twentieth century.
But not even the judgment issued by the Supreme Court more than a five-year period prevented the file launched in 2008 from expiring that same year. Hence, Costas now opts for maintain the conflict with the inhabitants of Bajo la Cuesta and initiates the File for the recovery of possession of the maritime-terrestrial public domain unduly occupied by a construction in the area of Bajo la Cuesta Las Tablas, in the municipality of Candelaria (Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Official name for each of the 49 houses of the town .
Those who live in the neighborhood
At the moment, only about twenty of them are in use, since the rest of the nucleus has been evicted since they left their homes on October 27, 2016, in the face of the danger of collapse of the slope detected and reported by municipal technicians. The return materialized on May 28, 2018, once Endesa, the company that owns the part of the slope above these houses (the first half of the neighborhood), completed the stabilization and protection work for that strip of the cliff. This group of inhabitants is the one that begins to receive the notifications sent by the Provincial Coastal Service of Tenerife. Those who have not been authorized to return to their homes, because they have not acted in that area of the slope, have not received communications from Costas, yet.
Bajo la Cuesta is located between vertices V-233 and V-241 of the official map. Therefore, within the terrestrial maritime public domain by virtue of the 1969 demarcation. This was reflected in the expired file called Demarcation of property in the public maritime-terrestrial domain of the stretch of coast of about three thousand sixty-two meters in length, between El Chovito beach and Barranco Hondo, in the municipality of Candelaria ( Tenerife Island).
