According to the complaint by Verdes de Europa-Tarifa, the El Cuartón urbanization has been plagued by complex urban planning and registration issues for decades. This situation is directly linked to land classification, license granting, and infrastructure conditions. The parent property, on which the urbanization is built, is registered as rural land in the Property Registry, while individual owners' plots appear as urban, and subsequently as consolidated urban land, a classification that, according to the party, does not align with the physical reality of the terrain.
The environmentalist organization criticizes that the Tarifa City Council has granted building permits for over fifty years on land classified as rural, lacking the necessary basic infrastructure. Concurrently, taxes have been collected as if it were consolidated urban land. This duality, in the opinion of Verdes de Europa-Tarifa, has caused continuous harm to both citizens' rights and private and municipal heritage.
“"For decades, the developer who was supposed to execute the infrastructures did not assume their obligations, and despite this, building licenses continued to be granted without approved projects or sufficient basic services."
A central aspect of the complaint is the non-compliance with a High Court of Justice of Andalusia (TSJA) ruling from 2021, stemming from a file initiated in 2014 (A21/2014). This ruling, according to the group, obliges the City Council to assume the maintenance of El Cuartón through the expropriation of streets, roads, and open areas. However, Verdes de Europa-Tarifa asserts that this resolution remains unenforced and warns of an attempt to shift this responsibility to a Community of Owners that they consider illegally constituted.
The spokesperson for Verdes de Europa-Tarifa, Rosmarie Hennecke, pointed out that in 1998, the City Council allowed a group of owners to assume the developer's responsibilities by forming a “Community of Owners of the El Cuartón Urbanization”. The group maintains that owners were forced to take on responsibilities that were not legally theirs to obtain building permits. Furthermore, there were previous rulings that rejected the validity of said community, considering that plot owners were not subject to the Horizontal Property Law.
Finally, Verdes de Europa-Tarifa emphasizes that many owners acquired their land without knowing the legal history of the case and raises questions about how rural plots could come to be registered as urban. The group demands that the Council assume its urban and legal obligations in El Cuartón, ending a situation they deem detrimental to both residents and the environment.
