Lomo Negro does not have a sheriff to control it, but surely someone who is in business with the development, presumably illegal, of this land. Despite not being one, this area contains all the elements comparable to the growth of the Wild West in the best of westerns. It is a city that, for at least a decade, has grown uncontrollably in the shadow of the El Fraile neighborhood. In a rustic land of agricultural protection. In other words, according to current legislation, it cannot be used under any circumstances for residential use, either through fixed or removable structures. Nor can they provide basic services, be it water or electricity.
However, the area has fixed and removable homes, neighbors, a hardware store and even a small plot for celebrations, while the residents aspire to a more than complicated legalization. In the first place due to the location of the property and the classification of the land. Secondly, because Lomo Negro is subject to a judicial investigation after being denounced by the Canarian Agency for the Protection of the Natural Environment (Acpmn) at the request of the Arona City Council, at the time when José Julián Mena was mayor and Leopoldo Díaz Oda Councilor for Town Planning, as it is a situation that, as the courts will say, borders on or goes beyond criminal law.
The modus operandi that has made the growth of this illegal city possible is not complicated: the farms have been segregated into properties of 10,000 square meters, the maximum allowed by law, and buyers are made participants in a percentage of the ownership of the farm. This in what refers to the notarial and registry.
In practice, the entire area is divided into plots that are for sale and that are bought to build a place to live on. In a space in which it cannot be done, the possibilities of legalization? The prescription of the infractions, taking into account that, at the moment of initiating an administrative file, the time for it to occur is paralyzed, or via the General Plan. In both cases, the question always arises as to whether to legalize what is done wrong de facto and also what will happen now that the Prosecutor’s Office has intervened and may or may not file a complaint or complaint.
In fact, on July 5, the then-acting Ecological Transition Councilor, José Antonio Valbuena, reported that his department had already sent the Public Prosecutor the development of this population that sits on a total of 150,000 square meters.
For Valbuena, however, it is clear that those who have built on land with these characteristics will not achieve legalization under any circumstances. Thus, his department and the Agency itself, explained that “people who build without a license may find themselves involved in criminal legal proceedings as accused of a crime against land use planning, punishable by up to four years in prison.”
The acting executive director of the Acpmn, Ángel Rafael Fariña, added that “currently there are criminal proceedings open against many of the owners who have built or installed their homes inside the segregated plots”, in addition to warning that “These lands are condemned to not be able to be reclassified as urban by the City Council for at least 20 years, since the Canary Islands Land Law establishes that the urban planning instruments may not reclassify land that, being rustic, has undergone an irregular parceling process planning until said term has elapsed.
However, in the last electoral campaign, there were formations that went to the residents of Lomo Negro to promise them that they would take care of the problem and provide a viable solution that experts see as more than complicated.
In fact, this will be one of the hottest “potatoes” that the new mayoress of Arona, Fátima Lemes, will have to face, who in her team, precisely in the area of Urbanism, has a former mayor of More for Arona, Luis García , under whose management between 2015 and 2019 a situation that now threatens dozens of residents did not stop.
Apart from the occupation of agricultural protection land for residential use, the subdivision, construction and installation of houses generates multiple damages to the environment, ranging from discharges into the subsoil to the destruction of native flora or the lack of basic services.
That was what led the previous municipal government to meet with the Agency, to exchange information and data with it until the Acpmn fenced off and sealed off the area, a seal that was lifted, a fact for which a complaint has also been filed. This precinct was not able to stop either the parcelers or the buyers, who have not only been denounced, but the former have been fined 150,000 euros.
