Friday, February 7, 2014

Hayek has designs


Not Fritz, but Salma. Who is the latest to want to take advantage of the curious Spanish real estate situation;
La Almoraima is the source of an escalating dispute between the central government, run by the conservative Popular Party (PP), and the regional government of Andalusia, run by the Socialists, over what may be built on the 10 percent of the estate that does not fall within the protected bounds of the Natural Park of Los Alcornocales.
Spanish enviromentalists want to have their park at taxpayer expense, while others think it should pay its own way.
The Spanish state has run [Hotel] La Almoraima since 1983, when it expropriated it from Rumasa, a business conglomerate on the brink of financial collapse. Since then it has been under the auspices of an incorporated firm that manages a small hotel located on the grounds, inside a converted 17th-century convent. There is also a restaurant, food crops, cork production from the oak trees, hunting expeditions and guided tours of the property, whose landscape is unique to Europe. Fifty-four people work full time, and another 40 part-time, in what the website describes as "the last remaining Mediterranean jungle."
Which is to say there are more highly valued uses for it, if the interests of several developers (including Ms Hayek and her husband) are a clue.

Not that Spain isn't used to civil strife over property rights;
The regional court of southern Andalusia on Thursday convicted Marinaleda Mayor Juan Manuel Sanchez Gordillo and the others of serious disobedience for ignoring warnings to leave the Las Turquillas ranchland they occupied during the summer of 2012.
Defendants given sentences of less than two years in Spain are generally not imprisoned unless they have previous convictions.
Sanchez Gordillo has staged several activities to highlight the plight of Spain's near six million unemployed, including Robin Hood-style supermarket lootings in 2012 to aid the poor.

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