Campaigners are looking forward to the demolition of an eyesore. It’s a hotel set amid pristine sand dunes on the Canarian island of Fuerteventura.
However, it might be best to keep the cava on ice, according to those who have monitored the controversial life of the RIU Oliva Beach hotel and resort, which rises contemptuously from the landscape of the Parque Natural de Las Dunas de Corralejo.
The 2,600-hectare park forms an area that extends down the eastern shore of the island. Its designation describes it as “a sandy expanse of great geomorphological integrity and enormous scientific interest”, providing a habitat “rich in protected native species”.
The hotel that intrudes into this wild, unspoilt and windswept landscape comprises more than 800 rooms on eight floors, plus additional apartments, some of which are now privately owned.
It was a ruling in March of this year that appeared to seal the fate of the hotel, when Spain’s Ministry of Ecological Transition (Miteco) declared that its planning concession had expired. The environment secretary, Hugo Morán, instructed the “lifting and removal of existing facilities”.
But nothing is ever quite as it seems around Spain’s complex coastal development laws. Since 1989, the Ley de Costas (Coastal Law) has striven to maintain public access to the country’s entire coastline. It defines the “public domain” of the seashore as including all of the beach, as well as a wide area of sand, shale or pebbles that can stretch beyond the reach of the highest tides. That land belongs to the state and comes under the arm of the military. Inland of this is a 100-metre strip in which only buildings built legally before 1988 can remain. Development faces restrictions within a further 400-metre strip.
The RIU Oliva Beach hotel was constructed in 2003 on the basis of a special concession and the understanding that the company that owns the hotel would relinquish its ownership of the island of Lobos, which sits between Fuerteventura and Lanzarote.
In terminating the concession, the ministry now cited unauthorised construction work, and the failure to allocate enough of the site for public use. The authorities issued a fine of €204,000 in 2022 and ordered the demolition of several illegal structures, including a swimming pool.
But the fine has not been paid and nothing has been demolished, while – in a further complication – there is an ongoing legal argument between the Canary Islands regional government and the Spanish state concerning the level of autonomy on coastal affairs.
It’s not the only Canarian planning scandal. In Lanzarote, the Papagayo Arena hotel, on the edge of Playa Blanca, was declared “criminal” in 2007 in a corruption judgement against the former local mayor. The hotel exceeds the island’s strict laws on the height of buildings and has cut off public access to part of the beach.
Chris Elkington, who runs the English-language Canarian Times, has adopted a weary cynicism about the whole illegal development debate. “As far as the Oliva Beach is concerned, the town hall wants to legalise it and it’s in an area with nothing around it. I think you will find that it will actually get ‘legalised’. But the Papagayo Arena will go on being a grey area for years.”
As the Canary Islands strive for a more sustainable tourism model, Lanzarote in particular remains littered with the concrete corpses of abandoned tourism overdevelopment and often-corrupt property speculation. Meanwhile, local people, priced out of the housing market – as they are in many other parts of Spain – are becoming increasingly vocal in their opposition to mass tourism. After all, that’s what caused all the over-development in the first place.
Stan Abbott is a journalist and travel writer
