There will come a day when they knock down the ugliest building, in the broadest sense of the word, ever perpetrated on the coast of Spain. In the Algarrobico beachin Carboneras, in the heart of the Cabo de Gata-Níjar Natural Park, has been standing for more than twenty years a mass of concrete that never opened its doors and ended up becoming the most recognizable symbol of the Spanish urban disaster.
The impossible monument. The hotel with twenty floors and more than four hundred rooms was born in the years of the real estate boomwhen the construction fever seemed to recognize no legal or environmental limits, and ended up literally wedged on the sand of one of the most valuable virgin beaches in the Mediterranean.
Today, rusted, cracked and abandoned, it is still there as a physical and moral anomaly: a building declared illegal by the courts, rejected by society and yet extraordinarily resistant to disappearing.
An irreconcilable aberration. The contrast alone explains the scandal. Cabo de Gata-Níjar is one of the most unique natural spaces on the Iberian Peninsula: Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO, Ramsar spaceNatura 2000 Network and recurring candidate for national park due to the exceptional nature of its volcanic landscapes, its terrestrial and marine biodiversity and its Posidonia meadows, among the best preserved in the Mediterranean.
In this setting of coves, dunes, cliffs and protected fauna, the Algarrobico bursts in like a foreign bodyvisible from kilometers away, causing disbelief in visitors and shame of others among those who know the story. What should have been a natural paradise ended up hosting one of the biggest environmental attacks on the Spanish coast.
Licenses, false plans and nonsense. The origin of the problem dates back to the late nineties and early two thousand, when the promoter Azata del Sol got a license of works by the Carboneras City Council with the initial endorsement of the Junta de Andalucía.
That authorization was based on an irregular modification of the Natural Resources Management Plan of Cabo de Gata, in which a plan was replaced without following the legal procedure or being published in the BOJA, de facto reclassifying it as developable. a protected soil. Years later, the Prosecutor’s Office would point out that, if there had been technical errors, the only legal route would have been a formal modification approved by the Andalusian Government Council. That administrative shortcut opened the door to a construction that should never have started.
A judicial labyrinth. Since in 2006 a court ordered stop the works When the hotel was almost finished, the Algarrobico became a case endless judicial. More than a dozen rulings of the Supreme Court, resolutions of the Superior Court of Justice of Andalusia and repeated pronouncements have concluded that the hotel was built on protected land and must be demolished.
However, each failure opened a new blocking path. The Supreme Court went so far as to point out that before demolishing it was necessary to formally cancel the municipal license, an obligation that the Carboneras City Council has failed to comply with for years despite judicial requirements. The result has been a dead end in which no one seemed to have the definitive key.
Responsibilities. in this mess they have lived together for years the municipal inaction, the changing positions of the Junta de Andalucía and the repeated announcements of the central Government. Signed protocols, public commitments and political promises followed one another without the mass disappearing.
Meanwhile, organizations like GreenpeaceEcologistas en Acción and WWF kept alive social and legal pressureeven taking the case to European bodies and denouncing that El Algarrobico was not an isolated anomaly, but rather the emblem of a model that left similar scars on many other Spanish coasts.
The route of expropriation. The most relevant change came when the Government decided to activate the path of expropriation of the lands that invade the maritime-terrestrial public domain. In February 2025 it was declared public utility of those plots and the procedure to occupy them and proceed with the demolition began. The promoter Azata del Sol tried to stop the process with an appeal, but in August 2025 the Ministry for the Ecological Transition he rejected itclosing the administrative route and accelerating deadlines.
The Administration maintains that there is no defenselessness, that the expropriation cause is clearly motivated and that the general interest of restoring a protected space justifies the action. With this decision, the Executive is getting closer to fulfilling its commitment to demolish at least the part of the hotel located in the first hundred meters of the coast.
The never ending story. Although the rejection of the appeal brings the demolition closer, the procedure continues being complex. The determination of the fair price, the possibility of judicial appeals and the coexistence of two different avenues (state expropriation and the annulment of the municipal license, defended by the Board) keep the risk of new delays open.
The Government can occupy the land for social interest, allocate an amount and continue, but the promoter still could come to the courts. At the same time, the Carboneras City Council, under pressure from the TSJA, has finally begun the review of the license, a process that, according to environmentalistscould run aground if there is no real political will.
A symbol that transcends the building itself. Beyond deadlines and technicalities, El Algarrobico has become something more than an illegal hotel. It is the permanent reminder of a time when ethe implicit motto was “build it, something remains”, and how the lack of effective controls allowed to violate the law even in natural spaces of maximum value.
Its demolition is not only an aesthetic or environmental issue, but a gesture of reparation institutional and credibility of the rule of law. As long as the building remains standing, it will continue to project the idea that illegality can endure indefinitely.
Twenty years later, the outcome seems closer than ever, although the history of Algarrobico invites caution. If it finally falls, it will not only be the demolition of a hotel, but the symbolic closure of one of the darkest (and ugliest) pages of Spanish urbanism.
Image | Greenpeace, Untypographical, PhotoLanda, Millers
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