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IF you drive along the Andalucian coast road east of Almería, you enter a desolate wilderness.
The bustling port gives way, alarmingly rapidly, to a flat expanse of moorland where nothing seems to live, except a few shivering seagulls: gone are the cheerful chiringuitos of the Costa del Sol, and the placenames tell you all you need to know – “Bitter Water”, “The Beach of the Dead”.
The little town of Carboneras feels empty and isolated.
As you walk around its lonely streets, you feel like you’re in a Spaghetti Western (and in fact those iconic movies were filmed near here in the 1960s).
British expats with dream homes built on illegal land may FINALLY be released from property limbo in Spain’s Andalucia – but not if environmental groups have their way
‘Illegal’ eyesore hotel on Spain’s Costa Blanca will be partly demolished 21 YEARS after construction
MUST READ: Unwanted developments, ‘touristification’ and greedy politicians selling the country out are destroying Spain’s coastline – new report
If a developer were to construct a 21-floor hotel right on the seafront, how could we characterise it?
An act of philanthropy, injecting life and jobs into a dying community?
Or a cynical gamble, trying to play fast and loose with environmental laws?
We encourage our readers to look up the Hotel Algarrobico on Wikipedia.
There can’t be many articles on that ‘non-judgmental’ site which start with the words, “this hotel is a ruined building in Spain”.
In the year 2003, when work started, the construction boom was in full swing.
But our story really begins in the 1980s, before this strip of coastline was designated a National Park.
Developers knew full well that the Spanish government was going to classify the area as such, and they knew that under Spanish planning law it’s almost impossible to put up something new on virgin beach.
But this was before all the tawdry Marbella scandals were widely understood: this was the age when the concrete-pourer was king.
Developers did as they pleased. After all, they were making Andalucía prosperous, weren’t they?
A company called “Azata del Sol” obtained permits to build the Algarrobico and set about erecting it.
Whether you see this as clever sleight-of-hand, dodging the dead weight of bureaucracy, or a breath-taking act of environmental piracy will depend on your point of view.
What is not in dispute is, when they started building the Algarrobico in 2003, the land was a protected area.
Azata del Sol argued that its 1980s permits were valid – and didn’t Carboneras need jobs for its citizens?
Protestors, both local and international, got involved.
In Britain, for example, if someone is building a tower next to your bungalow, you can apply for an injunction to stop them cutting off your daylight.
In their endearingly direct way, the Spanish call this a ‘paralysing’ order.
For years, the Algarrobico has been ‘paralysed’.
The courts can’t agree what to do. The Andalucian High Court gave the project the green light in 2014, ruling that the land could be developed, and Greenpeace and others brought an action against those very judges.
The Junta de Andalucía (broadly equivalent to a British County Council) is taking steps to demolish the empty hulk of the hotel with no guests.
However, 11 years have passed since the steps began, and Algarrobico is still standing.
If the people of Carboneras expected the 400-room hotel to transform their lives economically, they have been disappointed.
The syndrome has been repeated many times in Spain: local citizens are persuaded that a new development will bring prosperity, but what actually happens is that skilled workers are brought in from outside, leaving only low-paid, menial labouring work for the natives.
Meanwhile, Greenpeace has not let up.
The environmental activists call Algarrobico “one of the biggest scandals on Spain’s 5,000 miles of coastline”.
They claim to have won in court more than 40 times – and in truth, the complex has never functioned as a hotel in the 20years since it was ‘completed’.
Greenpeace asks, pertinently, why is it still standing?
And now, as of April 2025, the hotel is back in the news. Demolishing it would, it has been estimated, create 400 local jobs. The mayor of Carboneras, Salvador Hernández, has commissioned a viability study.
The developer, Azata del Sol, has made it clear that it will fight any move to scrap the hotel, all the way up to the Supreme Court.
It would seem that the illogicality of Big Tourism, and the hollow shell of the Hotel Algarrobico, will remain with us for years to come.
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