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Sixty years ago, David Lean traveled to Almera to shoot his movie, "Lawrence of Arabia."
The location was chosen because it was just an empty desert facing the sea. The movie crew built a plywood replica of Aqaba, the Red Sea port city, in a dry river bed, which they used as a temporary stand-in for Lawrence and his troops to charge on horseback and capture.
In the decades following, many other parts of the Spanish coastline became almost unrecognizable, with massive construction to draw tourists and their dollars. Many retirees from northern Europe are attracted to the greenery of golf courses and resort towns.
Even as Almera was transformed by greenhouse agriculture, much of its land remained pristine and rugged, hosting few aside from film crews keen to offer the likes of Clint Eastwood, Yul Brynner and Jack Nicholson a striking terrain worthy of their movie. Almera is not connected to the high-speed rail network that spans the rest of Spain.
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One of the largest protected nature sanctuaries in southern Europe is the Cabo de Gata-Njar Nature Reserve.
The beach where Lean built Aqaba is now dominated by a 21-story hotel that was abandoned when it was nearing completion nearly two decades ago. The Cabo de Gata-Njar Nature Reserve has one of the largest protected nature sanctuaries in southern Europe, and the abandoned hotel is an unused, useless, and ugly example of this.
A 15-year court battle over how to build a hotel has become a litmus test for whether Spain can encourage more sustainable development in its travel industry, which has long underpinned the Spanish economy. Real estate acts as an economic engine in Spain and other places, but nature is more easily damaged than repaired, which is a serious issue.
There are other Algarrobicos along the Spanish coast, but how the hotel can still exist is a mystery. She said that they have ignored regulations in their search for the golden goose.
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The lobby of the Algarrobico hotel would have been covered in construction equipment.
Understanding the timeline can help explain how a tourism project can go wrong when political, financial and environmental interests are not aligned.
The Cabo de Gata was declared a nature park in 1987. The park covers almost 150 square miles of volcanic land. There are a few fishing villages and former mining settlements. A section of the protected area was redesignated as buildable land when the park was created. Azata, a Spanish real estate developer, bought it and built a beachfront hotel. Private homes that were built before the park were the only other buildings nearby.
In 2006 environmental activists went to court and got a judge to freeze the project because they argued that the hotel was in violation of the protected status of the park. The hotel was found to have violated the park's protection laws by the Spanish Supreme Court.
There was a new court battle over who should pay for the rehabilitation of the surrounding landscape and who should be responsible for the demolition of the hotel.
The hotel has been decaying despite thePukiWikiPukiWikiPukiWikiPukiWikiPukiWiki beingPukiWikid through more than 20 separate rulings. One of the bay windows has the word "demolition" in Spanish painted in large blue letters on it, and its white facade is defaced by graffiti.
The Aqaba film set was quickly dismantled, but there is no clear end to the disastrous hotel. In July, the highest regional court of Andalusia ruled that Azata, the real estate developer, had a valid building license and that the hotel wouldn't have to be destroyed. Azata did not respond to the request for comment.
Spain was the second most popular destination in the world in the year before the coronaviruses hit, with 84 million international visitors. A large number of tourists traveled to the fine-sand beaches of eastern and southern Spain, often staying in heavily built resort towns that also cater to package tourists, like in the skyscraper town of Benidorm. Cabo de Gata offered a contrast to the concrete.
The park is the crown jewel of the southern Spain's ecology, and the one area where our simplistic sun-and- beach tourism model has not prevailed.
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The director general of Playas y Cortijos is trying to convert a former farmhouse into a boutique hotel. The site is a kilometer inland from Playa de los Genoveses, a remote and pristine beach in the Cabo de Gata park.
The Cabo de Gata park is a great place to go for hiking, as well as for scuba diving and kite surfing. In the summer, many visitors head for the campgrounds, where they can see the stars at night, because there is no more than 45 rooms within the park.
Local environmental activism has been boosted by the Algarrobico hotel. A boutique hotel was going to open in front of the Genoveses beach, but 200,000 people signed a petition to stop it. The hotel's promoter still hopes to get the go-ahead to build a 30-room hotel that will rehabilitate an existing farmhouse and stables.
The director general of the company that wants to open a boutique hotel said that the Algarrobico was a giant outlier that stigmatized any new economic activity in the area. The company plans to use existing buildings and add 25 jobs, according to Mr. Garca. He said that if nobody creates jobs around here, we will not protect the area but allow it to die off. Almera has an unemployment rate.
Even so, environmentalists are fighting an uphill battle to stop more damaging tourism projects in places like Almera. Property speculators have been encouraged by the political and legal systems. The regional lawmakers of Andalusia voted to give an amnesty for 300,000 housing units that had violated construction rules.
Spain has had a coastal protection law since 1988, but it has not stopped Spain from continuing to build along its shores in a way that other European countries have not allowed.
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Construction on a second hotel was halted in 2008 when the financial crisis hit. It is not clear what will happen to the structure.
The coastline of Almera is scarred by other tourism projects. There is an abandoned hotel on the Macenas beach at the entrance to the town of Mojcar. The hotel was halted by the bursting of Spain's construction bubble in 2008 and was a contrast to the 18th-century fortified tower. Nobody knows when this concrete honeycomb will be removed.
In Mojcar, an association of environmental activists, called "Save Mojcar," has recently been staging protests against a plan by town politicians to increase the land area allocated to real estate projects. The tour of destruction is presented by the activists to show people where further construction could destroy the landscape.
The Mojcar association is led by a performance artist who said that politicians would like to double the number of tourism apartments. We keep going in the opposite direction of mass tourism because of greed and corruption in the Spanish real estate sector.
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Even though the structure is molders, construction cranes still stand over it.
Almera has been enjoying a bumper tourism year, as more people flee the city due to the coronaviruses.
Many local residents want to stop talking about the Algarrobico hotel debacle.
The fate of the hotel and the mistakes of the past are for the courts to decide, according to the mayor of Carboneras. The politician who awarded the license for the hotel was his uncle.
