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Date Published: 06/10/2021
ARCHIVED - Cartagena City Council reverses decision to build new centre on undeveloped Monte Blanco land
Alternative sites proposed on social media, but Cartagena Council criticised for failure to care for natural Mar Menor habitats
The City Council of Cartagena has backtracked on its unpopular plans to build a multipurpose centre on virgin natural sand dunes in La Manga, and have announced they will not be developing the new construction on that land due to the Law to Protect the Mar Menor from July 2020.
Nonetheless, the Association of Naturalists of the Southeast (ANSE) has blasted the City Council of Cartagena saying its justification for not developing the Monte Blanco land was a mere legal technicality instead of doing it for the right reasons – the need to preserve the last undeveloped areas of La Manga.
The Monte Blanco dune reserve is a public area where restoration and conservation work has been carried out over the last decade to protect endangered flora with the support of the Cartagena City Council and various other educational centres, organisations and companies coordinated by ANSE. At present, Monte Blanco has a forest and bush cover of endangered dune juniper and the otherwise extinct maritime juniper, plus many other unique species. This space was created with the aim of recovering open spaces in La Manga del Mar Menor to improve the quality of life of its inhabitants and increase the tourist attraction of this enclave.
New possible construction sites
Alternative construction sites have come flooding in for the multiuse building. Regional authorities and the Mayor of Cartagena insisted that the original Monte Blanco site chosen for the building was the “only available space”, but critics swiftly took to social media to suggest a whole variety of different places it could be built.
The most convincing of these is a municipal plot of land located in Cabo de Palos, which was ceded to the City Council of Cartagena to be used as a nursery back in 1997.
The piece of land, measuring 1,000 square metres, was gifted to the City Council of Cartagena for “public use for pre-school education” because of “its exceptional location (between Cabo de Palos and La Manga) and ruled out its location in any other place”, but no work was ever undertaken for this purpose.
Now this information has been recovered from the property, located on Calle Arándano in Cabo de Palos, and a formal request has been submitted to the Mayor’s Office to study the site and to include it among the options for transferring the planned Monte Blanco construction.
Image: ANSE
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