Formentera Council asks for unchanged protection of island's coastline

As a result of the 9 May passing of the Coastal Law reform measure, the Formentera Island Council wishes to express its support for the legitimate requests of owners of numerous legally-built houses and tourist structures, made by the Plataforma d'Afectats per la delimitació costanera de Formentera (Group of Residents affected by the Formentera coastal delimitation).

The reform measure has met with political unanimity in addition to endorsement by the most recent plenary session accords. The last such accord – reached at the plenary session of 31 October 2012 – requested a fair coastal delimitation specific to Formentera, a voiding of the 1997 version of the law and a maintenance of the current legal scheme and protected-zone boundaries.

The Formentera Island Council has always asked that current boundary lines be maintained, allowing affected landowners to recover their property, but emphasized at the same time that this should not be equivalent to a weakening of Formentera coastal protections.

Unfortunately, the restructuring of the Formentera shoreline – which currently includes an additional, special layout – has often seemed to translate into a retreat from the Coastal Law's original goal: protection and conservation.

Formentera has always requested that the reforms to the Coastal Law be developed in a such way as to uphold current protective constraints, thus respecting the consensus in Formentera in favour of land conservation.

The administration has acted coherently throughout the entire process with regard to the agreements reached with other political groups at the plenary sessions. The Formentera Council views the abandonment of the effort to protect our coastline as an unnecessary result of partisan interests.

Formentera's peculiar geographical layout requires that both the previously-mentioned premises be upheld: first, a maintenance of the level of protection and conservation of the island's coastline, and second, a respect for private property.

We will remain vigilant in the assurance that the new delimitation affect neither the viability of our local model nor of a local tourism that respects the environmental values that characterise our island.