The promoter of the macro-hotel that is being built in Playa Blanca confirmed that the former president of the Cabildo of Lanzarote Pedro San Ginés (Coalición Canaria), the former mayor of Yaiza Gladys Acuña (Unidos por Yaiza) and the former Deputy Minister of Territorial Policy Domingo Berriel (Coalición Canaria) signed an agreement to expand the beds of the project to 1,440, making it the largest on the island.
After 24 years since the City Council of Yaiza granted the construction license, the hotel promoted by the company Yudaya SL is expected to be ready by November of this year, in the midst of a debate on tourist degrowth. The organization, then led by José Francisco Reyes, repeatedly convicted and under judicial scrutiny for granting illegal licenses, authorized the construction of 945 tourist places promoted by this entity in two hotels in Playa Blanca.
While the hotel was being approved at the end of the 20th century, the Cabildo of Lanzarote approved the Revision of the Island Plan for Territorial Planning (PIOT) with the aim of establishing a "tourist moratorium" and curbing the growth of the accommodation offer on the island. Between 1998 and 2000, the city councils legally committed to not granting new licenses for hotel construction. At that same time, Reyes granted licenses to create more tourist places in Yaiza.
Over the years, these places multiplied and this project reached 1,440 accommodation places in a single "large plot", but until now Coalición Canaria has insisted that it was the island government led by the PSOE that authorized this macro-project. Now, during an interview granted on the morning show Buenos días Lanzarote, the CEO of the promoter Yudaya SL, Javier Puga, acknowledged that they had “many problems with the Government of the Canary Islands and with the City Council", but "the Modernization Law came, which allowed that by renovating a hotel, you could gain beds", he added.
At that time, Yudaya SL, parent company of HD Hotels, invested in the rehabilitation of an establishment in Costa Teguise, "where even a public square was built", justified its director. In 2011, "we made a millionaire renovation and a public park in the Hotel Las Arenas Teguise (Costa Teguise) and this, according to the law, gave us the right to expand the number of beds", explained Javier Puga. The Governing Council of the Cabildo of Lanzarote "rewarded" Yudaya for having rehabilitated the hotel in Costa Teguise and, in exchange, the organization offered it the obtaining of an authorization for 531 new tourist places to expand this establishment or to use it on another land in Lanzarote.
To advance in the construction of this macro-project, the two companies Yudaya SL and HD Hotels reached "an agreement through a second agreement, in which everyone signed, with Domingo Berriel (then Deputy Minister of Territorial Policy), on behalf of the Government of the Canary Islands, Gladys Acuña, (mayor of Yaiza) on behalf of the City Council of Yaiza, and Pedro San Ginés (president of the Cabildo of Lanzarote) on behalf of the highest island organization, and with that we settled everything”, added the CEO of the promoter.
During the signing of this second Urban Agreement to which La Voz has had access, the three public representatives committed to multiplying the authorized places in the construction of the hotel promoted a decade ago by the company Yudaya SL in Playa Blanca, recovered in 2014 the more than 900 places granted by the City Council of Yaiza at the end of the last century as well as the 531 offered as a "reward for rehabilitation", justifying in this way the current 1,440 places.
This document reflects how public institutions endorsed creating a "large plot", "with the characteristics and capacity necessary to accommodate a single tourist establishment".
"It is absolutely false that the current Cabildo of Lanzarote (led by the PSOE) has approved the creation of the largest hotel in Lanzarote, in terms of accommodation offer, which is being created in Playa Blanca", defended last week the current president María Dolores Corujo. "It was Pedro San Ginés, and Domingo Berriel from CC and Gladys Acuña who increased it to 1,440 beds", Corujo denounced during her intervention before the press in which she advanced the declaration of Lanzarote as a Touristically Saturated Island.
"That is the legacy they defend for the island of Lanzarote", accuses the president of the Cabildo of Lanzarote to Coalición Canaria.
The largest hotel on the island will be operated in its first ten years by the Barceló chain, according to Puga. The director of Yudaya defends that in this work "the projects that bring quality, bring greater value. The projects that will suffer the most are those that are less prepared. Competition is healthy and makes everyone get their act together, but as in all businesses".