The Torrevieja City Council is expected to grant initial approval today, Monday April 27th, to a specific modification of the General Urban Development Plan. This modification will authorise the urban development plan for Sector 29, “La Ceñuela,” which has the capacity to accommodate 1,347 homes and 3,387 new residents. This will necessitate the votes of the People’s Party’s absolute majority. The municipality will only receive the 11,492 square meters of land designated for public facilities within that sector upon final approval. Subsequently, it will be able to transfer the land to the Valencian Regional Government for the expansion of Torrevieja Hospital.
Dividing
The developer will finance and construct the widening of approximately 800 linear meters of the CV-95, between the N-332 and Los Balcones, according to the document that is being presented to the full council. The project has been drafted and is currently in the final stages of completion. Mayor Eduardo Dolón clarified that the municipality and the administration intend to co-finance the project. This is due to the fact that the final project calls for a high-capacity road with a third lane in the direction of Torrevieja, which is significantly different from the initial proposal.
The plenary session is the initial approval process, as the process necessitates a subsequent public consultation period that will be subject to allegations. The Generalitat is responsible for the final approval, which is contingent upon the effective transfer of the land and the construction on the basis of the duplication. Consequently, the deadline for the effective transfer of the land and the construction is uncertain.
It could be six months, a year, or two. Dolón, the mayor and city planning councillor, has not yet disclosed information regarding the land transfer and road widening, which are currently inextricably connected to the final approval of the plan. He claims that the administrative moment has arrived to disclose the information.
Expansion
In response to citizen groups’ demands for enhanced healthcare, he and the regional minister announced the expansion of the University Hospital during a visit on February 4th. He mentioned that the land transfer was already in progress and provided the plot’s dimensions, but he did not specify the specific modification that was initiated in response to the developer’s request in 2024.
He had previously received environmental approval from the Generalitat for his proposed partial plan, subject to the final approval being obtained through the modification of the General Plan (number 116), which will be presented to the Torrevieja City Council on Monday. He insisted that the funding for the road widening, which the mayor requested between 2019 and 2023 and has promised will be imminent since the People’s Party assumed power in the Generalitat, would be public and would total five million euros. This funding is distinct from the general concession project for the entire road that the Generalitat has announced.
Nevertheless, the 2025 budget, which was extended to the current fiscal year, did not include a five million euro allocation in the public accounts. The project’s drafting was indeed awarded and has been finalised. In the direction of Torrevieja and at the roundabout that accesses the hospital, the daily traffic jams on the segment of road between the bypass and Los Balcones are particularly severe during the peak tourist season.
It is registered with an average daily traffic of nearly 20,000 vehicles, with only one lane in each direction. The plot of land being transferred is a component of an urban development plan that commenced processing in 2005 to reclassify rural land as developable. This land has been included in the planning since that time with acquired rights and is not susceptible to the construction of the new desalination plant, as the mayor has been ensuring for months.
Location and desalination facility
The land is situated to the east of the hospital parking lot, in the vicinity of the Torremiguel Irrigation Community road, where a new road access to the healthcare centre will be established. An additional 25,000 square metres of green space are situated between that point and the desalination facility. The second desalination plant, which the Ministry for Ecological Transition has proposed to generate water resources for irrigators as a result of the reduction in water transfer, has the potential to impact other expansions of the healthcare centre if it is able to be accommodated within the available space. Nevertheless, the expansion that the City Council is currently proposing would not be impacted by this, as it is solely dependent on the approval of the urban development plan. In anticipation of the Administration’s future sanction of their urbanisation project on 399,354 square metres, the developers of the La Ceñuela sector will not grant carte blanche for the transfer of land on this occasion.
The transfer of the 11,400 square metres of the plot that will be used to construct the hospital expansion will be formalised, and the project to widen the CV-95 road will be executed once the modification of the General Plan and the approval of the land readjustment project, which are being processed in parallel as permitted by Valencian urban planning legislation, become administrative realities.
The plot of land designated for public facilities is still being planned for that location, and it has not been impacted by the cutbacks that have been made as a result of the Pativel plan since 2006. The ill-fated Microsoft Global Health Innovation Center, which was announced in 2010 by the then President of the Generalitat and Mayor Pedro Hernández, was even proposed for the site. However, the centre is now forgotten.
There is no fee to pay
The landowners, who are also developers in the sector, are determined to avoid making the same error. In 2003, they donated 100,000 square metres of land that was designated for public facilities to the City Council. The Council subsequently transferred the land to the Generalitat, the regional government, where the Torrevieja University Hospital was constructed and inaugurated in 2006. In exchange for the processing of the same urban development plan and the reclassification of over 700,000 square meters of non-developable land, which would subsequently be reclassified as developable, this contribution was made. Additionally, they were obligated to widen the CV-95 highway. They are still anticipating the final approval of this plan two decades later.
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