The Provincial Prosecutor’s Office of Santa Cruz de Tenerife has activated the criminal case against the allegedly illegal subdivision and construction of the “city” that has been growing in the shadow of El Fraile, in the southern municipality of Arona, in the last 12 years : the area called Lomo Negro.
More than a hundred homes have been built on rural agricultural protection land at the site, despite multiple warnings and notices about their illegality. This led the then Minister of Ecological Transition of the Government of the Canary Islands, José Antonio Valbuena, to announce a complaint to the Prosecutor’s Office for these events, which was made public in July of this same year.
Well, from those dusts, these sludges. The Prosecutor’s Office has already acted, formally presenting an indictment against the owner of the 150,000 square meters on which this new town is located, coming out of nowhere, in which it is possible that some people have made a lot of money, but in the that others are on their way to losing an important part of what they have.
Registered and with water supply
Nothing that has residential use, whether fixed or removable, can be built on rural agricultural protection land, nor can services or supplies be received. However, despite them, 200 inhabitants of Lomo Negro are registered in the Arona City Council and up to a dozen water connections granted before 2015 have been detected. This is not the case for everyone, since the majority of those They live there, rent – there is, of course, vacation rentals – or have their business – there is even a hardware store – they receive water weekly in tanks and have solar panels.
The complaint from the Provincial Prosecutor’s Office of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, to which this newspaper has had access, expressly includes the prosecutor’s consideration that what happened in Lomo Negro “presents characteristics of a crime against the planning of the territory committed in Arona”, for which requests that the owner of the land be received as investigated – previously called accused -. This type of crime can lead to prison sentences, fines, disqualification and the obligation to restore the altered order. That is, demolish the buildings erected on the plots “acquired” by the neighbors for prices starting at 29,000 euros. However, formally, they were not purchasing those plots, but rather a percentage of the total property, since it could not be segregated below 10,000 square meters, the maximum allowed by current legislation.
Sources related to this case have also explained to DIARIO DE AVISOS that, following the complaint by the Prosecutor’s Office against the ownership of the land, others have been filed by the Public Ministry of an individual nature against those who have built.
Breaking the seal and parceling
This case was activated by a complaint from the Arona City Council to the Canary Islands Agency for the Protection of the Natural Environment, with the aim of not only avoiding non-compliance with the law, but also avoiding the consequences that would arise for those who have purchased part of the land. .
From there, in the month of October 2022, the area was fenced and sealed, a seal that was broken, as was confirmed in an inspection carried out on December 2 of that year. All these facts are included in their complaint by the Provincial Prosecutor’s Office of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, which states that “the parceling activity continued.”
Regarding the legalization of housing, the legislation in force is exhaustive in this regard. And this was expressed at the time by the director of the Agency, Ángel Rafael Fariña, who, in addition to explaining that “currently there are already criminal proceedings open against many of the owners who have built or installed their homes inside the segregated plots”, he warned 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 will not be able to reclassify lands that, being rural, have suffered an irregular process of urban subdivision while said period has not elapsed.”
