Popular Chíllar river beauty spot faces another summer free-for-all with visitors

Nerja’s Chíllar river is facing yet another summer without the long-awaited controls on visitor numbers. Apart from 2020 and 2021, when the town hall prohibited access due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the natural beauty spot, in the heart of the Sierras Tejeda, Almijara and Alhama mountains, attracts thousands of visitors every year.

However, the town hall has been calling on the regional Junta de Andalucía government for many years, to introduce controls on visitor numbers after a succession of accidents, problems of littering and the risk of wild fires for more than a decade now, with an average of around twenty each summer season.

Some of the rescues have been reported in the media, including that of a Dutch woman who spent 18 days lost in the highest part of the river in June 2011, or the one in May 2019, when a Swedish tourist spent a night with five children after getting lost..

Sources from the Junta de Andalucía have assured SUR that "work is being done on the planning, which we hope will be resolved shortly" and Malaga province’s representative at the Junta, Patricia Navarro, promised that the regulation would be approved "shortly" in the lead-up to last month’s local elections.

The area has started to see a constant flow of visitors for several weeks now, with no controls at its entrances, which causes problems of overcrowding, risk of accidents and rescues and damage to a protected natural environment, where in the summer months up to three thousand people can visit in a single day, including bus-loads of hikers organised by companies who charge money to take them to the site.

In recent years Nerja town hall has repeatedly asked the Junta de Andalucía to adopt "appropriate measures” and "to act urgently in order to regulate access to minimise the risks”. In a press release, the town hall said, "We have returned to pre-pandemic situations in terms of the influx of visitors, which increases the risk of accidents, as well as environmental deterioration and the problem of possible forest fires.”