The Los Dolses school in Orihuela Costa has repeatedly filed numerous complaints with the Department of Urban Planning, denouncing that the schoolyard has become the drainage area for the adjacent houses.
The school administration, headed by Isaac Bonafé, and the Parents’ Association have erupted in protest against what they consider a health hazard at a school with over 600 students. The wall separating the school from the rear terraces of the surrounding buildings is so deteriorated that a third of the schoolyard has been cordoned off due to the risk of collapse. “They’ve cornered us, surrounded by urine and fæces, and nobody is doing anything about it,” says Bonafé, who has counted up to 12 open drains, one new one just two weeks ago and the previous one in August of last year. He emphasises that “this isn’t an isolated incident” but rather “a problem that has been going on for 15 years.”
His predecessors in office also reported it repeatedly, submitting formal complaints to the City Hall, but “no one comes to force the residents to comply with the law and seal the holes, installing proper drainage in their homes as would be normal.” He adds that “infrastructure and maintenance have always been a problem on the coast, but this is tantamount to allowing illegal activity.”
Inspections
Throughout this time, the director asserts, planning technicians responsible for monitoring urban planning violations and even the local police have visited the school. “They’ve all prepared reports which they’ve then sent to the City Council, without anything happening,” he laments, while criticising that “the City Council is only interested in granting building permits, while it has a school in this condition, completely abandoned, with wastewater—mostly near the preschool area—being dumped into the playground, the type of which no one can identify.”
Thus, he concludes that the educational community of Los Dolses is “fed up and tired of the inaction, contempt, and disdain of the City Council.” Furthermore, he maintains that “neither the councillor [Matías Ruiz] nor the mayor [Pepe Vegara] care about the children, because if they did, this would have been stopped from the very beginning.”
“We shouldn’t have to come and study in such deplorable and unsanitary conditions because the local authorities aren’t doing anything about it,” he insists. “Water can keep dripping from the terraces, mixed with pet urine and feces, and nothing will happen,” he reiterates, not knowing what else to do, because “the one who should really be defending us is the owner of this land, which is the City Council, but they’re ignoring us.”
Therefore, he wonders what would happen if this situation occurred on the property of the councillor or the alderman: “Could it be that we matter less than the mayor and the councillor for Urban Planning?”
Expansion
Added to all this is the problem of overcrowding in the classrooms, something that the school, which has been awaiting expansion for over a decade, has reiterated countless times. They are waiting for the City Council to prepare a cost estimate for the project and transfer the land to the regional education authority. The project, they point out, remains stalled in the Urban Planning Department, which cites a lack of technical staff. However, the headmaster notes that numerous contracts have been outsourced during this term, and that three municipal plots of land were recently put up for auction, from which the City Council expects to raise 21.6 million euro, suggesting that it is “a matter of priorities.”
Structure
Furthermore, Bonafé warns, “part of the building’s structure has sunk about 40 centimetres.” He recounts that the pillars supporting the first-grade classrooms have cracked and given way. “When a school floor is sinking with children inside, what are we waiting for? Someone has to take action,” he concludes.
Los Dolses school is one of three schools on the Orihuela coast, along with CEIP Playas de Orihuela and School Number 20, currently housed in temporary buildings while awaiting approval from the regional education authority for a plot of land donated by the City Council to build a permanent brick school. This project was already planned by the previous Valencian government (Government Botànic) with a 9 million euro investment. At the end of the year, Orihuela offered the regional government over half a million square metres of land for the construction of the third school, presenting 46 municipal plots for the regional education authority to assess and determine the most suitable. This followed the rejection a year later of the initial proposal submitted in 2024, a 12,000-square-metre plot of land designated for public facilities on Limonero Street in the La Cuerda residential area.
The registration period begins on Thursday, and considering the number of applications, everything suggests that schools will continue to be overwhelmed by the growing demand on the Coast, which also has special characteristics such as a large number of students who arrived outside the registration period and with a percentage close to 80% who do not know the language.
