On June 1st, the Left Bloc announced a series of visits to the Algarve including one to the ‘Salgados – Praia Grande ‘Eco’-Resort’ site between Armação de Pêra and Galé where MillenniumBPC is trying to sell the project to any international investor willing to take the risk.
The plan to build a golf course, three hotels and a collection of ‘tourist villages’ led to calls from the Bloquistas for "more action and fewer words to end this sort of environmental attack,” and with this in mind the party executive has applied for a parliamentary hearing to discuss the misnamed eco-resort planned for this countryside area.
The Left Bloc already has stated that “there is a special urgency over the planned project for Lagoa dos Salgados, between Silves and Albufeira, which despite being presented as ‘ecological,’ involves destroying one of the main saltwater wetlands on the coast south of the Tagus."
See, 'Left Bloc slams Millennium bank's 'Salgados - Praia Grande eco-Resort' development)
Since the visit last weekend, the Left Bloc, spurred on by local MP João Vasconcelos, has demanded that the Secretary of State for Spatial Planning and Conservation of Nature, Célia Ramos, appears at a special hearing to discuss the development that lies in the Silves municipality - a council that is united in its opposition.
The Left Bloc wants to know how this project is viable when it is in a protected area and says the public interest needs to be safeguarded. Public opposition can be gauged by the Save Salgados petition set up by conservationist Frank McClintock which so far has gathered 34,133 signatures.
The possibility of making a tourism project viable in this protected area must be "clarified so that the public interest is safeguarded," say the Bloquistas who have seen the recent sales pitch from real estate company CBRE, that the resort "can move forward at any time."
The project includes three 4 and 5 star hotels and about 350 residential units integrated in tourist villages, as well as an 18-hole golf course all on 359 hectares of delightful open countryside.
Paulo Lemos, the discredited Secretary of State for the Environment in the Passos Coelho government, issued a favourable environmental impact statement but included six environmental hurdles that must be overcome before building starts and around 100 monitoring measures to reduce the impact of the resort on the natural area.
On July 1, 2016, MillenniumBPC requested that an urban permit license be issued but Silves council says that legal actions are still under way. These challenge the legality of the whole Praia Grande Detailed Plan, the execution terms of Phase 1 of the project, and the environmental impact statement, "whose uncertain outcome may influence the project."
The Left Bloc sums up its political view that, "Without concrete and effective action, one day, very soon, we will discover that the Algarve no longer has any conditions to be a world leader in sustainable tourism. Then it will be no good crying over spilled milk."
The project, which was spawned by the crooks at the Galilei group, a company mired in the BPN scandal, had the full backing of the previous Silves mayor, Isabel Soares, whose career in local politics was been market by inquiry after inquiry into her fiscal probity, nepotism, autocratic management style and constant whiff of corruption.
With the full backing of Silves council, a nodding ‘yes man’ was found in the form of the Regional Director of the Economy, Gilberto Viegas who ‘represented the government’ at a signing ceremony.
The project would never have been approved if the new rules of the Regional Plan for Territorial Planning in the Algarve had been retrospective but the Salgados - Praia Grande project was one of a number of developments in the Algarve that were deemed to have ‘acquired rights’ and was passed.
The Left Bloc request for clarification from the Secretary of State, Célia Ramos, is not the first, as in 2013 it questioned the then Minister of Agriculture, Sea, Environment and Spatial Planning , Assunção Cristas, on this issue
In a set of questions posed in October 2013, by the Left Bloc MP Cecília Honório she got the unhelpful answer that Galilei already had signed an urban development agreement with Silves council.
All went quiet on the political front until last week’s Left Bloc visit to the site, spurred by the announcement that MillenniumBPC has appointed a sales agency to sell off the site.
The environmental pressure group, Friends of Salgados, has been waiting for legal clarification on an earlier and deeply flawed environmental impact assessment commissioned by the developer, Finalgarve (part of Galilei) which covered only Phase 1 of the development and somehow failed to spot the existence of a rare and highly protected orchid, Linaria algarviana, the Algarve toadflax.
The owner of the project, MillenniumBPC, represented by its head of PR, Erik T Burns, the PR Agency HK Strategies which porports to "reflect the voice of the public, at every intersection, especially when an important decision is at hand," and the real estate agency CBRE under head of development, Francisco Sottomayor, all have decided to ignore the furore surrounding the development of this natural area, not to engage with the media and thus ignore the significant public and political interest in Salgados - Praia Grande.
To see the background to this story, Click HERE
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