A small white house with blue windows and doors is the only piece of local history that remains in the last built-up corner of Playa Blanca (Yaiza), just before entering the Papagayo beaches on foot, in the Los Ajaches Natural Monument. Located on the so-called El Afre beach, which stretches for just under half a kilometer of cliffs and black sand, this house has survived for more than a hundred years in an area famous for its urban speculation and for having housed the stretch of coastline with the most illegal hotels in Spain.
Juan Antonio Morales is one of the heirs to this small house, which still belongs to his mother and where his father died. The coastal dwelling is located next to the illegal Sandos Papagayo hotel (formerly known as Papagayo Arena). Since mid-November, the hotel property has been opening a path just behind the house and has forced Juan Antonio Morales to recall the mid-nineties when the owners of the hotel complex began to chip away at the virgin cliff that guarded his home and where his parents' goats and chickens grazed.
"All I ask is that they leave the little house as it is," Juan Antonio Morales states during a conversation with *La Voz*. This citizen explains that since the works began, he feared the structure of his home could be damaged. "Back then, houses were built with very little, four stones, and now with that big machine, with that monster chipping away, 'chip chip' all day long," complains this resident about the machine's rumbling from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM. Although he assures that a few days ago they finished chipping away at the cliff behind his home.
Sources from the Yaiza City Council have explained to La Voz that these works are part of the creation of two access roads to the beach of Las Coloradas (or playa El Afre) that the Directorate General of Coasts of the Government of Canary Islands authorized to be carried out for the hotel's property, against the criteria of the Directorate of Coasts of the Government of Spain, which had issued an unfavorable report. At the same time, the council states that the construction of these accesses would not imply the legalization of the hotel and that the property is awaiting the submission of another legalization project.
The virgin cliff that Juan Antonio Morales still remembers was replaced by a large hotel, with a building permit annulled by the courts and declared unlegalizable. The hotel accommodation exceeds the maximum permitted height, has more floors than legally allowed, and was built occupying a public access road to a beach. Added to this is the fact that almost the entire hotel is within the coastal protection easement declared by the Directorate General of the Coast and the Sea"**I cried like a child**," recalls this Yaiza resident about the work to build the hotel almost thirty years ago. "I'm resigned now; at first, I cried out of helplessness seeing the trucks and the dust. Now, what's built, no one is going to tear it down," he states. The new work on his family home reminded him how they destroyed the virgin cliff: "When I saw the machine the other day, my whole past came back to me."
An illegal hotel open to the public for decades
The controversial Sandos Papagayo is one of the 22 hotels whose licenses were declared null and void in Lanzarote and one of the three that have not yet been able to legalize their situation. Specifically, its license was declared null and void by the courts in 2007 by the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands for committing serious urban planning violations. Then, in 2016, it was declared a criminal offense by the Provincial Court of Las Palmas, which sentenced the then mayor of Yaiza, José Francisco Reyes, to six years in prison and disqualification and ordered the seizure of all his assets.
The mayor of Yaiza, José Francisco Reyes, was convicted of the crimes of urban planning prevarication, administrative prevarication, money laundering, prohibited activities and negotiations by public officials, bribery, and embezzlement of public funds. The Provincial Court stated at the time that Reyes "altered the urban reality of the municipality" and that he had given a free pass to the construction of hotels "with no legal basis other than his whim," even authorizing up to seven establishments (around 1,500 tourist beds) on the same day.
This is compounded by a judicial ruling from January 2022 by the Contentious-Administrative Court number 5 of Las Palmas, which delved into the merits of the case and ordered the full execution of one of the three rulings that highlighted the illegalities of the Sandos Papagayos hotel. Among them, it stated that the construction occupied 6,500 square meters of public access, because it was built by unifying two plots and making the public road that was between them disappear
Throughout all these years, the establishment has remained open to the public and has housed tourists despite not having any authorization to do so. Added to this is an order for demolition issued by the Yaiza City Council in March 2016, during the mayorship of Gladys Acuña.
The southern council itself concluded that this establishment, located in a privileged location next to the Natural Monument of Los Ajaches, could not be legalized.
The previous Governing group of the Cabildo de Lanzarote had already reported to the courts the attempts to modify urban planning regulations and achieve the legalization of this hotel.
Likewise, Ecologistas en Acción classified the Sandos Papagayo as "one of the biggest symbols of corruption in Lanzarote," after the Governing Council of the Cabildo of Lanzarote, led by Coalición Canaria and the Partido Popular, approved the tourist authorization for the hotel in the middle of summer 2024
