Selomar Hotel Benidorm Updates
19th February 2023
The Selomar Hotel will be given a new name the Barceló Benidorm Beach, although most of us will still fondly remember it as the Selomar. The façade of green canvas that stood out on the skyline of Levante beach is no longer and the building is already showing its new face to the world and awaiting the final touches.
The new hotel is finally getting closer to reopening after more than five years since its acquisition from the Almodóbar family, there is still no confirmation of an official opening date, just "Summer 2023". Watch this space...
The Barceló Benidorm Beach, will have 265 rooms and a "spectacular" roof terrace for its customers, they also promise "different gastronomic spaces". All this under the premise of hotel which will be "recommended for adults"..
The interior design of the hotel is being kept secret, but the first indications suggest that the rooms will be of pastel colours and light wood, with the colour blue being predominate.
The owners of the building are Hotel Investment Partners (HIP), and the managers of the new hotel are the Barceló Group.
16th May 2022
Finally after after years of stagnating building works due to problems with permits, Hotel Investment Partners (HIP) have all the permits in place and phase 2 of the building work which covers the interiors and the façade will begin. The famous Selomar´s intention is to be open for the 2023 season.
23rd May 2021
The renovation of the Selomar Hotel, which has over time remained as a ghost building in one of the most privileged areas of the city, could be resumed in a few months.
The reason work was stopped: The 2015 coastal deslinde forced the work to be paralyzed as part of the balconies came within the coastal protection zone, this restriction has now been lifted.
Benidorm City Council accepted in mid-April the transfer of 320 square meters on the beachfront that were left outside the public maritime-terrestrial domain, those areas will now be municipal, both on the seafront of Paseo de Colón and Virgen del Sufragio Avenue where the Selomar hotel is located
Selomar History - A 1970s hotel that closed its doors in 2007
The Selomar opened in the early 70s when Benidorm began to be the tourist city that is now and is in one of the most privileged areas of the city, situated on the Promenade de Levante and just a few meters from the old town.
The owners decided to close the doors in 2007, although the decision was to be temporary and was intended to serve to carry out reforms, sadly it never opened its doors again. During the following years a fire affected the structure and forced the eviction of neighbours and squatters from inside and vandalism made it a ghost building on the front line. A canvas has been covering its facade for years.
1st March
Images of what the all new Selomar hotel should look like after work is complete hopefully some time in 2023. Building renovations have not started as yet but after meetings held on February 15th, the Provincial Coast Service in Alicante signed the act of disaffection of the land on which the establishment is located.
The hotel is located in one of the best positions for tourism in Benidorm. In front row of the promenade of Levante beach, the busiest in the city. After refurbishment, it will become a four stars plus hotel with 245 rooms.
The property is owned by the listed real estate investment company (socimi) Hispania and is expected to be managed by the Barceló Group. Although they have not yet started the works, they already have the project underway and already show the definitive image that it will have, which recalls what it looked like before its closure for more than a decade.
4th December
The Barceló Group, manager of the Asia Gardens of Benidorm and Occidental of Alicante will begin the reform of the Selomar (272 rooms), in Benidorm, with the intention of opening in 2023. re-modelling works will start next year. They will also manage from spring 2021 two new 5-star hotels in La Nucía
31st July
The Selomar hotel, on the beachfront of Levante beach, has been closed for more than a decade and during this time fire and vandalism have taken its toll on the building, leaving it in bad repair and an eyesore in a prominent position.
Now, after two years since the reform began back in 2018, the City of Benidorm has completed the long administrative process for the general management of Costas to approve and reactivate the license of works that will allow to convert it into a modern accommodation.
In yesterday's plenary, the PP Government carried a motion ratifying the 2016 and 2019 agreements for the free transfer to the City Council of the front-line strips of land of Paseo de Colón and Mare de Déu del Sofratge Avenue that the Directorate General of Costas considers unnecessary for the maritime-terrestrial public domain. That second is where the Selomar hotel is framed who needs this deslinde to reactivate its construction license and that the reform can be carried out to turn it into a new hotel.
The Selomar hotel was acquired in 2017 by Hispania, through its subsidiary Bay Hotels & Leisure, for 15.6 million euros and an investment of between 15 and 17 million is planned for its rehabilitation to be a 4-star superior hotel.
The new property began with improvement work in June 2018 after years of deterioration, squatters and a fire in 2015 that affected the structure. But it all stopped soon after because of a problem with the delined being within the line of the land maritime public domain. The City Council and Costas disaffected that plot, but a judgment paralyzed the whole process and an agreement had to be reached to "save" the Selomar (and keep its balconies) and other buildings that are in the same situation both in this street and in Colón.
Yesterday, the procedure was carried out again to achieve it. The Council council of Urbanism, Lourdes Caselles, explained that at the request of the delegate of Economy and Finance of the Ministry in Alicante are now referred to "the certifications" in which the provision of the City Council is recorded to assume this free transfer of land and to comply with the commitments derived therefrom, so that this land is intended for roads or public spaces. Now the agency will have to answer again and it seems that this time it will be the final. Once you have this deslinde, the company will be able to reactivate its construction license to eliminate its footprint of the old Selomar on Levante beach and make way for a new accommodation.
Please note this story has been translated from Spanish to English so some detail may be lost in translation, read the original here in Diarioinformacion
Gemelos 28 Updates. This page will be continually updated with news about the Gemelos 28 apartment buildings and the proposed demolition
13th August 2023 - The Saga continues. Benidorm asks to delay the demolition of its two towers that were originally constructed with four to six metres of their base, occupying public protected land.
Benidorm City Council requests that an environmental report be prepared to decide whether the demolition has more pros than cons, one being that the the demolition could seriously affect the coast, due to the "inevitable fall of rubble, with possible contamination of the waters by dust and other substances,"
The money set aside by the Valencian government to compensate owners who bought in good faith, plus the complicated demolition costs is said to be around 100 million euros.
26th August Updates 2022 - Benidorm City Council request that the Gemelos 28 towers are not demolished, due to high costs and environmental consequences.
The City Council of Benidorm will go to "all instances that proceed" to achieve the recognition of "public utility" and "municipal interest" for the non-demolition of Gemelos 28. the Board of Spokespersons has agreed to bring a motion to that effect to the next plenary session.
The proposal will be based on a report by the municipal secretary, which shows, among other aspects, the high cost of demolition around 130 million euros, and the fact that once the building has been demolished it can be re-lifted just seven metres further from the coastline.
The "high" cost of removing the blocks. "The price to be borne does not justify the public usefulness of the execution of the judgment, rather the contrary," the report states, which calls the cost "absolutely excessive and disproportionate to the objective to be achieved."
In that sense, it adds that this expenditure "will become useless" in that "the plot can be rebuilt and the only thing achieved is to delay a few meters the facade built of the coast in that part of the urban land".
As if that were not enough, the clerk collects that "not a single square meter of soil will become public" since servitude does not imply a change in ownership.
The report also highlights the negative image that people would take of this "embarrassing" takedown due to the cost, conditions and effects of demolition for the Sustainable Development Goals, climate change and CO2 emissions into the atmosphere.
There are more arguments as it is emphasized that it would be "very difficult for society at large to understand" to spend more than 100 million demolishing a building "which can be built a few meters further back", as well as insisting on the "risks of landfills into the sea".
It is further considered that the enforcement of the judgment ordering the takedown rather than benefiting the general interest "would end up harming and injurying that interest".
Furthermore, the report sets out some proposals justifying non-demolition and points to some alternatives for environmental improvement of the coastline and citizen use.
These include the "protection and arrangement" of the edges of the seafront, "increasing the safety of the area's neighbors and users", the construction of a pedestrian walkway "from which you can access the sea" and, finally, "turning the entire ground floor into a public space landscaped as a playful and tourist lookout".
Similarly, the report proposes to the plenary that the City Council "suspend" any procedure that affects the demolition of the blocks and that it be declared that non-demolition "is a matter of municipal interest and public utility" both by "the realization of the project of extension of the Paseo de Levante" and for the "inefficiency and inefficiency" of demolition.
The Supreme Court's 2012 ruling ordered the demolition of the properties. However, in view of the difficulty of its implementation, the parties decided to go to the Court of Arbitration and Mediation of Valencia at the end of 2019.
That process was completed last July without reaching any agreement. The city clerk's report argues as one of the cases the "ultra-orthodox legal position" of the Court.
That said, the clerk sets out some reasons for the declaration of public utility not to demolish Twins 28. First, he cites that the demolition will not impede "the urban possibility of re-building the plot".
It also affects the impact that the plot is outside the scope of Serra Gelada's Natural Resources Management Plan (PORN) and its coastal area.
Please note the above has been translated from Spanish to English, read the original article here in DiarioInformation
Gemelos 28 Updates 1st August
Government and opposition will unite to find a way to prevent the demolition of the two towers after the attempted agreement failed.
They argue that the demolition would entail two costs: the amount that would cost to bring them down and how it would affect the environment in which it is located
The City Council "will fight to prevent the demolition",
31st July
Mediation to avoid the demolition of Benidorm's Punta Llisera towers closes without agreement
This controversial building which is positioned just a few meters from the sea above the Punta Llisera de Benidorm, could today be one step closer to its demolition. The Gemelos 28 complex has 22 floors and a total of 168 homes.
The Court of Mediation and Arbitration of the Chamber of Valencia has closed the mediation procedure transferred at the beginning of the year by the High Court of Justice of the Valencian Community without reaching an agreement between the parties, which would practically exhaust the last way to stop the demolition of the two towers.
They have been out of order since 2012, when the Supreme Court ratified a previous ruling of the TSJ that annulled the license granted by the Generalitat to Edificaciones Calpe in 2005 for invading the area of maritime-terrestrial public domain.
The execution of that judgment, motivated by the demand of a private citizen who has fought against the 'colossus', has been pending ever since. In all this time, the builder, some owners and the Generalitat itself, on which the entire cost of the process falls, have sued themselves in search of the courts declaring the judgment 'unenputable'. The last time, through this mediation process, in which the Benidorm City Council was also personified as an interested party, and which is now closed without reaching an agreement.
What will happen from now?
Sources who known about the process explained yesterday that, with the closure of this chapter, there are hardly any legal loopholes left to hold on to. The Generalitat Valenciana must demolish the two towers and compensate the owners with the money they paid for each of the houses, plus 20%, as the Court once collected. All this could entail a much more than one hundred million euros for public coffers.
The Consell budgeted only in compensation for the owners of the houses a consignment of 70,777,302.28 euros. To this we would have to add the cost of the demolition of these two buildings, a very complicated process that would practically force the work to be carried out manually, due to its proximity to the sea and the environmental damage that it could produce in the place where it is located, on the edge of the Natural Park of the Serra Gelada.
Both the autonomous and local authorities cling to this possible environmental condition, especially on the marine environment, as a spearhead to argue that the demolition should be left without execution. And they also argue that, once the complex is demolished, the owner of the land, the terra Terras de l'Horta, could re-build a similar building a few meters further back, so they consider that the very high investment that will have to be made would be in vain.
Consensus PP seeks settlement against demolition
The government of Benidorm, of the PP, has asked the two opposition groups – PSOE and Cs – for a unanimous stance to defend the damage that the demolition of the Gemelos 28 complex could bring. This was requested yesterday by the mayor of the city, Toni Pérez, at a meeting of the board of spokespersons at which the issue was addressed. The position of the local executive points not only to environmental damage, but also to the "economic hole" that this action would entail for the Generalitat at a time as delicate as the current one.
Please note this story has been translated from Spanish to English so some detail may be lost in translation, read the original here in Diarioinformacion
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8th July - Jet2 and Jet2holidays announce that flights will return to the Costa Blanca from July 19th if Spain remains on the Amber list
1st July - Jet2 have decided to cancel all flights and holidays to destinations on the AMBER list up to and including 18th July
25th June - For destinations currently on the AMBER list JET2 have made the decision to cancel all flights and holidays up to and including 14th July.
3rd June 2021 - Jet2 have decided to restart their international holidays and flights programme again from 1 July 2021
Due to the latest UK Government announcement, Jet2 have decided to restart their international holidays and flights programme again from 1 July 2021.
They will review the status of destinations on the Amber List following the next UK Government review which is expected to be on or around 21 June 2021. However, if your flight is due to depart on or before 30 June 2021 it won’t be going ahead and they will automatically cancel your booking and process your full refund within 14 days. If you’re due to depart between 1 and 21 July 2021, if you want to, you can amend your booking admin-fee-free. If when amending your flight the total cost increases, you’ll need to pay the difference.
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Please note this news report contains some strong language.
Police coup to the sale of pornography in five shops in Benidorm.
The local police seized about 500 items such as t-shirts with obscene messages, penis-shaped candy or plastic breasts that were sold in supermarkets and Asian stores.
Source - diarioinformacion.com. This article has been translated from Spanish so some information may be lost in translation.
T-shirts with obscene messages, penis- shaped candy, lighters with pictures of naked women and plastic breasts are just some of the almost 500 items that have been confiscated by the Local Police of Benidorm in an action against the sale of material of erotic content and pornography in a total of five shops located between Calle Gerona and Avenida Europe.
The action was initiated in response to the complaints of Benidorm's British Businesses Association (BBBA one of the aims of the association is - To promote family values in Benidorm´s tourism.) and dozens of citizens for the exhibition on the street of these objects that are in plain view to the entire world including families with young children. These shops only have supermarket licences and not licences for the sale of these erotic products.
Lorenzo Martinez (head of Public Safety, Emergencies and Beaches), explained that most of the items that have been confiscated were aimed at the British Tourists, who holiday in this particular area which is know as the *zona guiri (see below)* among the items seized were 380 brightly coloured t-shirts with clearly pornographic text written in English, with messages such as "lick my pussy", "fuck off", "fuck loud and make noise", "Suck my cock" and "I think he's gay", among many others.
The Local Police found that all these items were clearly visible to the public without any consideration for minors,
In addition, none of the establishments had administrative authorization for the sale of said products, which could result in a breach of the Royal Decree that typifies the sale of pornographic material.
Police sources indicated that this incident will now be passed to the Government Sub-delegation to interpose the corresponding penalty and, which in this case, can range from 600 to 30,000 euro fines.
*zona guiri - a colloquial Spanish name used in Spain applied to foreign tourists, particularly from countries in northern Europe or the Anglosphere. They are strongly associated with beach tourism and commonly stereotyped as blonde with pale skin and often drunk.
Updates 27th November 2019 - The case regarding illegality of the bar on the island returns to court
"The illegality of the bar on Benidorm island returns to the courts".
The town hall was given 3 months to undertake the removal of the bar at the start of this year.
Its still standing.....So.... a new court case is being brought by a Valencian anti fraud department, via the public prosecutor.
Antifraude presents to the Prosecutor a report with new indications about the establishment - The City Council insists that it is the responsibility of Costas. Basically the fight continues...........
Read all the Latest News Stories HERE
The Valencian Agency Antifraude has presented to the Prosecutor a new report in which it collects indications about the possible crimes committed by this establishment. This step according to sources, would add to a judicial process already opened long ago.
The restaurant on the Island of Benidorm has been operating for about 60 years, being one of the tourist points that receives dozens of tourists every day during the high season. However, its administrative situation has been in doubt for a few years for several reasons. Among them, because it lacks an opening license even though the establishment opens to serve customers.
In fact, Costas told Benidorm City Council earlier this year that it had three months to tear down the elements on the Island, such as the restaurant and the stairs. However, the government team claimed that it is precisely the central government that has the powers in that field. In fact, the current government of the PP It continues to maintain the same arguments as then, so that "we cannot act", as explained by municipal sources, who pointed out that the technical reports also contemplate it. In fact, Benidorm asked this agency dependent on the central government to grant this natural space to try to bring order to the islet, a request "that we are still waiting for Costas to resolve." As for the Antifraude report, the same sources did not comment on it.
As already stated, the last time the owners applied for the opening license was in August 2018. Only one month later, they filed an appeal by rejecting the Department of Urban Planning their request, but it was also dismissed in January.
The City Council then based its arguments that the establishment is on land in the maritime-terrestrial public domain and does not have the "qualifying title for the use of the facility." And, the Island, also located within the natural park of Serra Gelada, is registered in the registry in favor of the State since December 24, 1963 and included in the public domain since 1968. Hence the City Council continues to expose That is not your competition. Now it will be the court that will have to rule on the matter about whether or not there have been crimes in all the actions carried out in recent years.
At the moment the cafe/bar is still operating and you can visit the Island. Details HERE
Note – The article above has been translated from Spanish to English so some detail may be lost in this translation, read the original story at https://www.diarioinformacion.com/
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September 5th 2019 - The fate of the lovely cafe, bar etc on Benidorm's island features in Spain's national press today, as the owners continue to fight a demolition order brought by the government agency "Costas"..(The installations were described as "Illegal" in a natural park).
The " pirate island " of Benidorm -probably the last in the Mediterranean- could see the bar removed and the island returned to an environmental friendly place if the central government responds to the City Council's request to demolish the restaurant facilities that has been operating there without a license for more than 60 years.
In fact, in the same written communication from the Senate, Costas points out that the islet of Benidorm is part of the Serra Gelada natural park and, consequently, the competence to ensure compliance with the specific regulations, as well as “those discharged into sea that apparently are being produced from the mentioned establishment », corresponds to the Generalitat Valenciana.
The order of the Coastal Provincial Service was "to remove all existing facilities on land in the maritime land domain intended a restoration establishment (including terraces, stairs, reservoirs, animal cages, and other facilities linked to this establishment), prior to eviction of the natural or legal persons that exploit them ». It was dictated in February of this year and gave three months for its execution.
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