Torrevieja City Council has approved the lease of a centrally located, 700-square-metre building on Joaquín Chapaprieta Street to house a local police station during the final stretch of the current municipal term. The property, which comprises a ground floor, basement and first floor, will cost the city an annual rent of 47,916 euro, including VAT.
The contract with the company Arrendamientos Urbanos Torrevieja stipulates a lease until 2032, totalling 287,000 euro. Furthermore, the City Council has already begun the process of remodelling the facilities to house its headquarters, meaning the expenditure will be even greater for a property—which once housed a Lefties franchise store—that is not municipally owned. The contract includes a grace period until October, during which payments will not be due, to allow the City Council time to draft and implement the renovation project. It is highly likely that the lease will be extended until 2032, given the investment and the intended use of the building.
The property, located in the section between Ramón Gallud and Caballero de Rodas streets, features 478 square metres between the ground floor and basement, and 222 square metres on the first floor.
In parallel, and currently lay empty, located on Calle Azorín, parallel to the leased premises, the City Council has owned a two-story building since 2011. The building sits on a 319-square-metre plot and has over 400 square metres of constructed area. It belongs to the Association of Retirees and Pensioners, and the municipality has recently implemented conservation measures due to falling debris from the facade, which is protected under the General Plan’s catalogue and was spilling onto the sidewalk. In 2023, the mayor stated that a new use for the building was being considered.
The City Council also maintains the old Town Hall building in Plaza de la Constitución, with a 300-square-metre plot and a ground floor plus one upper floor, which has been closed to the public since 2014. Additionally, the building acquired in 2021 for over 600,000 euro on Calle Clemente Gosálvez, with a ground floor and three upper floors, was intended to be connected to the current Town Hall building, but only houses municipal offices on the ground floor. The rest remains empty and unused.
In addition to the rental of these premises, the City Council recently closed two others to expand municipal facilities on Caballero de Rodas street for 191,000 euro over four years, plus an adaptation investment of another 200,000 euro that is currently being carried out while the rent is being paid. The other premises will house the decentralised social services area.
Valuation without visiting the premises The municipal appraisal report concludes that the rent for the premises on Calle Chapaprieta is below market value. The City Council plans to pay 39,600 euro per year, plus 8,316 euro in VAT, bringing the annual rent to 47,916 euro. For the four-year contract, the cost amounts to 191,664 euro including VAT. If both planned extensions are used, the total expenditure would reach 287,496 euro including VAT.
The technical valuation, however, establishes a higher market price: 4,501 euro per month excluding VAT, equivalent to 54,012 euro annually excluding VAT. Therefore, the report considers that the rent proposed in the file—39,600 euro annually excluding VAT—is in line with the market price, as it falls below the estimated value, in the opinion of the appraiser who carried out the valuation. The same official acknowledges in the report that the premises were not accessed to perform the valuation.
The calculation was performed using the comparative method. The technician took six rental samples of similar premises in the urban area of Torrevieja and obtained a standardised unit value of 10.14 euro per square metre per month. He then applied correction factors based on the characteristics of the property: one of 0.65 for the ground floor and basement, due to the large area with a section below ground level, and another of 0.6 for the first floor, due to its administrative use compared to the commercial use on the ground floor.
Promises The initiative, spearheaded by the local PP government, aims to project a greater sense of security in the heart of the town centre—a key demand from some residents in the most populated area—beyond its potential effectiveness in daily operations. However, freeing up space also improves the current facilities of the main police station—located next to the CV-905, opposite Carrefour, more than two kilometres from the town centre—following the growth in staffing over the past two years, which now numbers around 185 officers, including commanders. This will allow for the expansion of changing rooms and offices at the main station.
Officially, the lease for the headquarters responds to the government team’s objective of continuing to strengthen public safety by increasing police presence in one of the city’s busiest pedestrian and commercial areas. The Department of Public Safety clarified when the process was initiated that it could not specify how many officers might be assigned to these premises because that is still under review. It did, however, suggest the possibility that, for example, the new group of twenty traffic officers could be based there. It also indicated that some services that currently require in-person visits to the existing headquarters, such as lost and found, could be consolidated there, and that the premises will include a room for filing complaints.
