The Playa Blanca Port expansion project has already started the environmental processing to become a reality, after more than 15 years of disagreements. This was announced by the Minister of Public Works, Transport and Territorial Policy, Domingo Berriel, who detailed this Tuesday in the regional Parliament the proposal prepared by Puertos Canarios, which has already been favorably reported by both the Island Council of Lanzarote and the City Council of Yaiza.
These works are declared of "Exceptional Public Interest" and their approximate budget is 46 million euros, as Domingo Berriel has recalled.
The proposal involves the execution of an outer dock to the current port with capacity for the two ferries that currently operate and "eventually a medium-sized cruise ship", leaving the current inner dock for sports and fishing use. With this solution, according to the regional Executive, "the occupation of a new space on the coast is minimized and the generation of new esplanade is strictly necessary for the needs of the port".
Once the writings of conformity with the proposed solution have been received, a period of one month is now foreseen for the completion of the technical documentation, initiating the procedures for the declaration of environmental impact by the COTMAC. A procedure that must be completed within a year, to then request the assignment of the affected Public Maritime Terrestrial Domain, by the State.
The Port of Playa Blanca, which connects Lanzarote with the island of Fuerteventura, has had a movement of about 835,000 passengers in 2012 and, according to Domingo Berriel, its main weaknesses lie in the concentration of nautical activities in a single dock; the small surface area of the land area of nautical operations; the "notable risk of interference between ferries and smaller boats" and the "scarce services" of the land facilities
More than fifteen years of waiting
Domingo Berriel recalled this Tuesday that since 1998, when the first preliminary draft was written, and "after the General Directorate of Ports had prepared more than 26 possible alternatives", no agreement had been reached with the local institutions, both the Island Council of Lanzarote and the City Council of Yaiza, "after having held numerous meetings with both institutions, which were unsuccessful due to lack of consensus".
In this regard, Berriel recalled that, "in order to complete the process of seeking consensus on the solution to be adopted, last February, the Managing Director of Puertos Canarios, communicated to the two local corporations already mentioned, the study of the suggested modifications, and the realization of the test in channel and the test in 3D that gave rise to modifications to optimize the proposed sections". Likewise, the traffic routes and the locations of the services were also "re-studied".
Thus, once the Basic Project and the Environmental Impact Study were completed, based on these modifications, the plan of the Port Expansion Project was sent, in order to collect the mandatory report established in the aforementioned article of the Law of Ports of the Canary Islands.
