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Marbella urban plan update

Marbella’s new urban plan is slowly winding its way through the administrative planning process.

A draft urban plan was submitted to public consultation last summer, which lead to almost 8,537 public submissions, known around here as ‘alegaciones’. Marbella’s urban planning department has so far dealt with 600 of them since October, and hopes to deal with the remainder before the summer so that it can meet the agreed deadline for provisional approval of the plan.

The new urban plan, drafted by the regional government in Seville, aims to sort out the urban planning mess created a succession of corrupt municipal governments. The draft plan includes a controversial scheme to legalise 18,000 properties under which owners may have to compensate the town hall in return for the legalisation of their properties.

But whilst Marbella works on its new urban plan, which everyone in the property business hopes will put an end to more than a decade of chaos in the property market, it has recently emerged that the town hall is still issuing building licences that contravene the draft plan. Politicians from the opposition Socialists Party have called for a temporary ban of all new building licences where there are doubts about their legality. The present mayor of Marbella, Ángeles Muñoz, of the right of centre PP party, has rejected this proposal as bad for the local economy, calling instead for “imaginative solutions” within the law.

Same old same old.