13.03.15 - 11:46 -
María Jesús Serrano in Torrox on Wednesday. :: E. C.
Three years after the Junta de Andalucía’s planning decree 2/2012 came into force, only half of the municipalities in the province of Malaga have actually made any progress in their part of the process. The decree, an attempt to bring some sort of order to the maze of illegal construction in rural areas, required local authorities to draw up an inventory of structures on land classified as ‘no urbanizable’ or to hand in a declaration stating that there were none.
Only town halls in the province have done this, an essential step before the properties can be named as Asimilado a Fuera de Ordenación (AFO). This status in any case has been declared as unacceptable by many home owners as it merely allows the properties to remain standing without making them fully legal.
The figure was revealed on Wednesday by the regional head of Environment and Planning, María Jesús Serrano, on a visit to Torrox, where she stated that the Junta was well aware of the complexity of the situation. “We have seen that the decree 2/2012 was not enough to solve the problem,” she said, “And so we are going to modify the LOUA [Andalusian land law] to include non-speculative plot divisions as Asimilado a Fuera de Ordenación,” she said.
It is estimated that there are 300,000 illegal properties in rural areas in Andalucía. Of these 50,000 are in the province of Malaga, 20,000 of them in the Axarquía district.
The spokesperson for SOHA (Save Our Homes Axarquía, which represents more than 400 home owners), Mario Blancke, has criticised Serrano for not inviting them to the meeting in Torrox.
