The plan for a luxury hotel at Monte Gordo that was due to be built ‘almost on the beach’ has been rejected by the Portuguese Environment Agency (Agência Portuguesa do Ambiente) under instruction from the General Environmental Inspectorate (Inspeção Geral do Ambiente.)
The Hoti Hotels Group was planning to start construction of the 'Meliá de Monte Gordo' this year, under a standard cooperation Agreement with Meliá Hotels International, with an opening date of "2018 or 2019" for the four-storey building.
The company paid the council €3.6 million, after a favorable opinion from the APA, for land on which it can not build a hotel, certainly not one just 15 metres from the beach.
It was clear from the start that, unless the land was re-designated, the hotel group had little chance of getting this project past the intransigent Agência Portuguesa do Ambiente whose coastal plan is being imposed under the gimlet eye of Sebastião ‘demolition man’ Teixeira.
There was an expectation that the hotel would fit into the wider, €200 million Monte Gordo redevelopment plan even though the land in question was restricted as it was so close to the beach.
The local mayor, Vila Real de Santo António’s Luís Gomes, is urgently seeking some answers but as things stand, he has sold Hoti Hotels a pup.
The Communist Party MP, Paulo Sá, had questioned the Minister of the Environment about the beach-side hotel, especially pertinent as small houses already have been demolished on the Ria Formosa Islands because they were 'too close to the water.'
Environmental association Almargem challenged the location of the proposed hotel on 8,000m2 of a seven hectare area which was categorised only for 'sports activities.’
“Why not use space already in the current urban network," asked Almargem in early May, adding that locals had lodged a legal challenge to the hotel even though the land already had been sold to the Hoti Hotel Group whose manager, Miguel Proença, has yet to respond to the rejection of his project.
Almargem is delighted as earlier its president feared the worst, commenting that “the dark clouds of dubious interests are covering the Algarve again.”
