In the long running battle on the island of Armona between a British couple, Paul Roseby and James Tod, and the various State departments that control planning laws and the island’s development, there is good news at last that their island home may be able to be completed.
There have been many false starts and several expensive court cases to wade through but the couple have remained determined that the home they are building on Armona should be completed as this is what the Council has authorised.
The modern, steel-framed property used the footprint of two old properties that were demolished in preparation for what was to be a dream home, with views over the Ria Formosa.
But the area in which the property was being built was not an authorised one and the Britons’ house, plus 140 other island homes, were deemed illegal and the court battles started.
Olhão mayor, António Pina, has assured the couple that all will be well but over the past two years, optimism was hard to keep alive as they fought to see a Polis demolition order cancelled.
The legal situation was far bigger than either Briton had imagined as the Council, which had authorised scores of houses over the years, faced a massive compensation bill and asked the Ministry of the Environment to intervene and redraw the land map to add the prohibited area to the island's urban zone.
This plan is said to be on the Environment Minister’s desk and will be signed-off this September which, if so, should allow work to restart and the threat of demolition finally to be erased. Reacting to a threat to mount a 27-hour protest outside the ministry, each hour representing a month of delay in sorting out this muddle, the couple are "promised a letter from the Minister giving us a completion date."
The demolition of 140 properties was pushed for by the disgraced former president of Polis Litoral Ria Formosa, Sebastião ‘Demolition Man’ Teixeira, who remains in charge of the Algarve Environmental Agency after being moved on from running Polis over his mishandling of the demolition programme on the neighbouring island of Culatra.
By the Minister redrawing the urban boundary, 140 property owners would be able to sleep easier in their island homes.
The other legal option, kept as a fall-back solution by the Council, was to grant each home owner a new plot in an authorised building area on the island. This would have caused as much of an uproar as having 140 houses knocked down for no good reason.
The end result may still be a mixture of these two options but this historic planning problem seems to be close to a resolution, with politics playing as much a part as local planning laws.
