Following the revelation that Torrevieja town hall is spending the best part of three quarters of a million euro on a house raffle on a TV show, the PSOE of Torrevieja has questioned the strategy of the PP government, as it goes squarely against the expert report commissioned by the town hall to solve the problems in the town.
The socialists identify the actions of the government team with the attempt to comply with the Torrevieja Tourism Development Strategy carried out by experts from the University of Alicante in 2020, but warn that advertising without having previously solved the deficits that this strategy identifies can become counterproductive.
The spokeswoman for the socialist municipal group, Bárbara Soler, has stated in a video uploaded to social networks that the main objective pursued by the actions set out in this Strategy by tourism experts is to disassociate the Torrevieja brand from the association with urban speculation and second homes “and we do it by raffling houses, a very novel strategy.”
As if that were not enough, “in addition to the 20,000 people who are expected to live in the area of La Hoya, the local PP is trying to negotiate the licence to allow the construction of up to 18 skyscrapers on the first line: the Baraka Towers”.
Soler has taken the opportunity to firmly question these intentions “in a city that the Tourism Development Strategy identifies with the hyperdevelopment of the real estate sector and the deficit of services for the citizens who already inhabit the city today. We are doing the opposite of what has been planned in the only spaces left to build, destroying the horizontal configuration of the city and causing a screen effect.”
Likewise, the spokeswoman has joked about the fact that the houses are raffled in cinemas that are not even close to Torrevieja, so they will not be able to serve, in the words of Soler, so that Torrevieja residents affected by the null housing policy of the PP of Mazón in the Generalitat and the local PP can access housing.
Bárbara Soler has opined that those 700,000 euro of propaganda only result in self-promotion for the PP: “the roadmap is to achieve a friendlier city, with more green areas, bike lanes, accessibility and cleanliness, many areas in which to invest before advertising”.
For Soler, the true deseasonalisation of tourism involves investing in improving the quality of life of Torrevieja residents and, consequently, “offering tourists who visit us a rewarding experience so that they not only come once because Pablo Motos has told them so, but also enjoy our city and decide to return”. To do this, she says, “we need to do some prior work to position us as a quality tourist destination, not a million-dollar advertising campaign in which we once again involve urban planning. It’s 1, 2, 3 expensive. But expensive for the city.”
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