The mayor of Teguise, Oswaldo Betancort, met this Wednesday with the owners or representatives of "frustrated" urban projects in Costa Teguise to ask for their collaboration in order to aesthetically integrate these 'skeletons' into the landscape. The City Council intends to hold a contest of ideas from which these landscape interventions will emerge, in which it will "partially collaborate or subsidize".
These 'skeletons' are hotel projects "affected by a final judgment annulling licenses", explains the Councilor for Urban Planning, Echedey Eugenio. These are unfinished buildings of which only concrete or brick structures can be seen. "Over the years they have become landfills or rubble dumps, with a great negative impact on the landscape," they point out from the Teguise Town Hall. "We don't want skeletons, rubble, or garbage in our municipality, we want life and landscape wealth, while the legal situation that each of these works is suffering is not resolved," said the mayor, Oswaldo Betancort.
To this end, the City Council will hold "a contest of ideas", explains Eugenio. The City Council wants to have the Pancho Lasso art school and also the one in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in this contest. The idea is to carry out "low cost" landscape interventions to "give a provisional visual outlet" to these skeletons, he adds.
Funded by the City Council and owners
The reason why the interventions must be "low cost", explains the Councilor for Urban Planning, is that "they (the owners of the unfinished hotels) told us that they would not be willing to assume large costs in landscape interventions either".
Thus, "the City Council has the idea of collaborating and partially subsidizing the interventions", says Eugenio. The councilor points out that the owners showed during the meeting with Oswaldo Betancort their willingness to "collaborate", but made it clear that "they are not going to make a large financial outlay on fencing".
Although the City Council is already "looking at ways to collaborate", there is still no budget for this landscape integration. "It will depend a lot on the material they use and the type of intervention," the councilor points out.
"Provisional" intervention and new projects
"The landscape intervention is for now, to give a provisional visual outlet until there is investment capacity to finish those projects or whatever they propose." Echedey Eugenio thus refers to the possibility that the owners propose "new projects" to the City Council for these 'skeletons', requesting new licenses after the Justice declared the ones they obtained at the time illegal.
Now, according to the councilor, the granting of new permits "is unlocked a lot with the approval of the General Plan (of Teguise)". This new Plan maintains the plots as "tourist, but expands tourist uses". In other words, where before by law there could only be "tourist accommodation", according to the councilor now projects of "recreational use, leisure, a shopping center... although always linked to tourism" can be proposed.
Thus, the owners will be able to present new proposals to the City Council with their corresponding economic viability study for the City Council to study. Any of these interventions, however, insists the Councilor for Urban Planning, "would go through a new license, adhering to the General Plan, the Modernization Plan, the Tourist Law and all the regulations that have arisen since this stopped;".
The whole process until these new projects are executed may take "two or three years". In the meantime, the City Council plans to carry out these landscape interventions "as soon as possible". Echedey Eugenio explains that they intend to "have the ideas and the possibility of voting for the winning project before the elections and, if possible, that there starts to be movement before". For that, they will launch the contest of ideas "shortly".
