Looks like
I found this episode in España fea, the book that has just appeared by Andrés Rubio about the calamities suffered by the Spanish historical heritage: urban chaos, coastal devastation, landscape degradation, destruction of much of the best architecture. The thesis could not be more resounding: if you thought that the excesses and abuses committed against the heritage are the fault of Franco's developmentalism, you were wrong. The worst came after Franco's death. It is no coincidence that the book's subtitle speaks of the "greatest failure of democracy."
The case of the railing of La Concha beach is just one (and probably the least serious) of the many that illustrate this journey by the damage done over the last four decades. Agricultural warehouses attached to Romanesque hermitages, monstrous hotels erected without the slightest respect for the law or decorum, outrageous and dilapidated congress halls, the savage demolition of iconic buildings or the very fine reduction to the skeleton, the falsification of the traditional architecture to adapt to the demands of the tourism sector, the meticulous erasure of any trace of the industrial past in certain urban recoveries, housing developments of a dubious medievalist taste in the historic centers, the devastation of privileged landscapes with the chaotic construction of beehives fighting for the best views ... The list, in short, would be endless.
All this nonsense has been going on for the last thirty or forty years, when we thought there were laws that protected us. It is significant that the 1931 Republican Constitution expressly stated a desire to protect the landscape. However, the rather lengthy one from 1978 does not contain any mention of this nature. Then what happens is that the legislators are inhibited in the protection of a collective good and that this inhibition drags all other things into a domino effect: the struggles between the different administrations, the inevitable legal nonsense, the camaraderie between politicians and promoters, and so on. If we look for those responsible, no one will be saved here, and the result is that, due to a cocktail of greed, corruption, inculturation and negligence, Spain has ended up becoming a country that has destroyed many things that are not they had to be destroyed and he has built many others that should not have been built either.
The French, more fond of their territory and its past than of ours, created the Conservatoire du Littoral half a century ago, which in a few years' time will have managed to recover twenty-five percent of the state for the state. coast. As a result, a quarter of the French coast has become untouchable and will remain as it always has been. Can you imagine that something like this would happen in Spain and that the degradation of the coast could have been stopped in time? Andres Rubio's book speaks of Benidorm as a bad example of kitsch architecture, but it is also acknowledged that its tall construction proposal has ended up being much more environmentally friendly than the opposite model, that of oil stain. It's something I've heard for several illustrious architects and urban planners for a long time: a dozen strategically distributed Benidorms would have saved the Spanish coast. These Benidorms would have been our particular Coastal Conservatory.
4
