The National Court has dealt a decisive blow to the urban development plans of the IFA Hotel Faro Maspalomas, owned by the Lopesan group, by dismissing its appeal to rectify the coastal boundary in one of Gran Canaria's most valuable accommodation areas. The First Section of the Administrative Court thus ratified the resolution of the Ministry for Ecological Transition, which, in December 2022, denied the hotel chain's request to separate the shoreline from the boundary established in 1995 in the section between Veril and the Maspalomas Lighthouse.
The ruling, authored by Judge Fernando Luis Ruiz Piñeiro and obtained by Maspalomas24H, rejects a claim seeking to reclassify strategic land near the Maspalomas Lighthouse based on the premise of an urban development that the court considers nonexistent from an administrative standpoint. Despite the decisive nature of the decision, the property owners still have the option of filing an appeal with the Supreme Court.
The legal dispute centered on the interpretation of Additional Provision Three of the Coastal Law, which allows for the redefinition of boundaries when there are seafront promenades built by the Administration. The company's defense argued that the area in front of the hotel possessed all the functional and morphological characteristics of a seafront promenade, including lighting, signage, and municipal maintenance services.
However, the court has determined that the current paved esplanade is not the result of a public promenade project, but rather the consequence of the subsidiary demolition of the hotel's former facilities, which the Administration was forced to carry out after the original concessions expired. The ruling emphasizes that, although an ambitious project existed in 1995 to rehabilitate the Maspalomas seafront, it was never completed in the specific section affecting the hotel plot. The judges point out that the ramp the hotel sought to legalize as a promenade had already been systematically denied in 1991 and 1997, when the company attempted to convert it into a sunbathing area with sun loungers and awnings for its guests.
The lack of a permit for that area and the absence of state-owned urban development works prevent, according to the ruling, any segregation of public land. This legal setback forces IFA Hotel Faro Maspalomas to accept not only the immutability of the current coastal boundaries, but also the legal costs of the appeal.
