This municipal decision concerns the endowment action 16, which allows the construction of a ten-story building with 468 homes in Plaza América, in the Guanarteme neighborhood. This project, which includes 831 parking spaces and 350 storage rooms, will become the largest residential building in Gran Canaria.
The rejection of the request by the city council opens the door for Ben Magec to potentially join the administrative dispute related to this real estate development. The project envisions a unique building with a large public square inside and is linked to the extension of José Mesa y López Avenue towards El Rincón and the Las Arenas shopping center.
The ecological federation is following a similar path to that previously initiated by the Guanarteme Se Mueve collective: a request for official review, rejection by the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria City Council, and subsequent filing of an administrative appeal.
“"Given the consideration that the road has as a general system in the economic document itself and in other documents of the PGO-2012, in addition to the existing forecast of public intervention regarding its execution, a large part of this will be materialized with public funds, in coherence with the quality of the planned road expansion that exceeds the category of a local road, so demanding its execution from the private developer is disproportionate."
The core of the dispute lies in who should bear the cost of extending José Mesa y López Avenue, valued at 3.8 million euros. While residents and environmentalists argue that developers should cover it, as the endowment is not considered a general system, the City Council maintains that this road is a structuring element of the territory and, therefore, its urbanization costs should be borne by the public administration.
This urban development is an example of the transformation of Guanarteme, an evolution that has generated neighborhood protests. The history of this area of the city has been marked by planning since 2000, when a 13-story building with 298 homes was allowed to be built. Previous projects, such as Fadesa's Gran Guanarteme, were annulled by the Supreme Court in 2008 and 2013. However, the City Council modified the planning, introducing the endowment action figure and reducing the heights to ten stories.
In 2018, the developer Residencial Las Américas, promoted by Dinosol and Satocan, began the procedures for urbanization. In 2021, the compensation execution system was presented and approved in January 2022 with the support of all political parties represented in the plenary (PSOE, PP, Unidas Podemos, Ciudadanos, and Coalición Canaria-Unidos por Gran Canaria), with the sole abstention of a non-attached councilwoman. This system has been challenged both administratively and judicially by neighborhood groups.
Of the 12,924 square meters of the project, 8,723 will be for residential use, 2,909 for the reorganization of Plaza América, and 1,292 for a public square within the building.
