Police seal off ‘illegal’ areas at Mar Menor campsite with 20,000 holidays ‘under threat’

POLICE have sealed off all common areas of the Camping Villas Caravaning site at Playa Honda on the Mar Menor in the latest salvo in a long dispute between the site owner and Cartagena City Council.

Sports courts, a restaurant and a supermarket were all closed due to safety concerns.

Toilet and shower blocks as well as 80 unlicensed pre-fab homes were also shut on Monday after the site owner- Caravanings Costa Calida SL- last month tried to block the move in court.

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Cartagena Urban Planning councillor, Diego Garcia, said: “These facilities are dangerous as they do not comply with fire regulations and also violate urban planning laws.”

“The council has a responsibility to ensure the safety of people and we have only sealed areas off without occupants,” he added.

Garcia continued: “The site owners tried to stop the closure but a judge authorised the council’s intervention over the facilities which break the law.”

People living in properties that have been closed will be allowed to return to pick up belongings.

A Caravanings Costa Calida statement said: “We are going to have to suspend the holidays of more than 20,000 customers.”

“It’s just catastrophic for these families and for the local economy.”

It added that it did not understand the council’s move which it described as ‘very aggressive’.

The operator claims they reached out to the authority to resolve the ‘complex situation’ but ‘there was no response’.

They also said that knew nothing about last month’s closure notice affecting 80 homes and had sent a request to regularise them.

The Villas Caravaning campsite is made up of more than 1,100 individual owners.

Some of them are grouped into two associations and have 423 camping pitches and 320 mobile homes.

An estimated 600 people live there all-year-round.

The 80 pre-fab properties had been erected without permission despite the council ordering the site owners to cease activities nearly three years ago,

There were two serious fires in 2021 and 2022, with an 85-year-old German man dying in one of them.

The campsite was granted a licence back in 1985, under a previous owner.

A new application was submitted in 2020 but was denied two years later leading to legal action from the council.

In turn, the operator filed an appeal against the order.