165 property owners to resolve the tourist future of coastal town in Granada province

The future of Playa Granada in Motril on Granada's Costa Tropical will be decided on Wednesday 14 January. The tourist expansion of the beach is being drawn on two million square metres, which have been awaiting development for two decades and where originally a large inland marina was envisaged.

If built it would convert the pocket of private land on the beachfront, between the Poniente beach campsite and the Hoyo 19 beach bar, into a gigantic area of water, measuring one hundred thousand square metres. It would also be surrounded by leisure infrastructures including hotels and a new golf course.

A lot has happened since the approval of the so-called Pla1 and Pla2 partial plans for the tourist expansion of Playa Granada. In the last two decades both the owners of the land and the businesspeople who have led the project have changed and there have also been phases of momentum and paralysis.

At present, the group that brings together the 165 owners of the land has a collegiate presidency, with solvent companies behind it. The board is maintaining the administrative processing of the marina and at the same time has entrusted the design of alternatives to make the partial plan more attractive to a team of experts, which includes the architect Vicente Guallart.

"There is a lot of work behind it," says the president of the group, Óscar González, about the final proposals that will be presented at the assembly for the owners to decide the future of Playa Granada. Motril town hall, as landowner, also forms part of this group and has worked together with them on the proposals to design what the new Playa Granada will look like.

Hotels and golf course 

The premises from which they started were clear: calm, sustainable development, with hotels, a golf course and the inland marina, as they consider the project to be compatible with the marina which is being built withing the current port area and which is ongoing.

It will be up to the members to decide whether to go ahead with Plan A, with the inland marina at the size in which it was conceived, the golf course, the hotels and the residential areas, which has the disadvantage that building costs would rocket. Alternatively they could opt for an adapted marina. Another option that will also be debated and which is expected to be put on the table by a sector of the owners is to move forward with the alternative of the partial plan approved in 2009, which did not include the marina, but land with hotels, housing and other facilities.

Motril town hall is still committed to maintaining the interior marina plan "but with an adaptation to make it economically viable". A solution that involves an innovation of the general plan, a complex process that could take a long time, although the town hall is confident that it will be able to speed up the process as much as possible, with the impulse of the new Andalusian law that allows simultaneous steps to be taken. They are also committed to maintaining a new 18-hole golf course to complete the existing one and turn Motril into a golf destination. The owners of the land will have the last word.