Legal action escalates over controversial Tenerife project
The groups and individuals who previously filed a lawsuit against the promoters of the Cuna del Alma project and the mayor of Adeje have announced that next Monday they will present an administrative complaint against the Government of the Canary Islands. They accuse the regional government of playing an active and decisive role in the irreversible environmental and historical damage caused by this tourism development in Puertito de Adeje, in the south of Tenerife.
Complaint targets coastal authority permission
According to a statement from the collective, the complaint is directed against the General Directorate of Coasts and Maritime Space Management of the regional government. It challenges the authority’s decision to exceptionally authorise “the occupation of the protection strip of the public maritime-terrestrial domain for private luxury tourism uses,” justified by a supposed benefit to the Canary Islands’ tourism model.
For the signing groups and individuals—Tagoror Permanente Rotativo, Rebelión Científica Canarias, Juan Francisco Galindo, La Gaveta 20A, and the Asamblea Reivindicativa Canaria-ARCAN—this decision makes the Government of the Canary Islands “a necessary accomplice in the environmental, coastal, and heritage destruction taking place in Adeje.”
Exceptional measure for private luxury, critics say
The complainants point out that occupying the coastal protection strip is an extreme exception under coastal law, only justifiable when there is a real, motivated, and proven overriding public interest. In this case, they argue, it has been authorised for private high-end facilities (a swimming pool and restaurant) in “one of the municipalities most saturated by tourism and urban development in the Canaries,” which has the highest housing prices in the archipelago and a coastline already deeply artificialised and overdeveloped.
“Far from serving the public interest, this authorisation worsens existing territorial, social, and environmental imbalances, deepening a predatory tourism model widely questioned by the Canarian public,” they add.
Accusations of providing a legal ‘cover’
In the view of the complainants, with these partial authorisations, the Government of the Canary Islands is offering the Arona court “a minimal cover story for the initial dismissal of a criminal complaint for potentially very serious environmental and planning offences.” They state this is a complaint being pursued by social and environmental groups in defence of the Canary Islands, whom “the Government of the Canaries is cowardly sabotaging and betraying.”
Like the complainants, the Public Prosecutor’s Office has also appealed the court order that dismissed, in just four pages, the criminal case. That investigation, opened this November, was examining whether public officials, technicians, and promoters of Cuna del Alma had committed crimes against land planning and the environment, documentary falsification, and misconduct in public office, among other things, during the processing of the controversial initiative.
Complaint to be filed with multiple authorities
The collective complaint will be presented next Monday to the Regional Ministry of Public Works, Housing and Mobility of the Government of the Canary Islands, which directly oversees the General Directorate of Coasts. It will also be submitted to the Agency for the Protection of the Natural Environment of the Government of the Canary Islands, which has the power to halt the works; to the Tenerife Island Council (Cabildo), due to impacts on the specially protected area of La Atalaya; to the Parliament of the Canary Islands, so that MPs can exercise control over the Government; and to the Ministry for Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge (MITECO), as it directly affects the application of basic state coastal legislation which is not being complied with.
The signing groups demand the immediate review of the granted authorisation, the adoption of precautionary measures to halt damage to the coastline and heritage, and the determination of administrative responsibilities.
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