“It is legally unacceptable to believe that a ZEPA is declared by filling out a form,” says the Valdecañas promoter

The promoter of Marina Isla Valdecañas considers “legally unacceptable to maintain that a ZEPA can be declared by filling out a form, as Ecologists in Action does.” The company states in a statement that maintaining that it is possible to award such environmental protection to a territory without giving citizens who could be affected the opportunity to claim “is incompatible with a rule of law like the one we have.”

Marina Isla Valdecañas SA exposes these arguments in a press release in which it reiterates that “it is evidence that there was never any administrative act of declaration of the SPA.” He also assures that it is wrong to defend that in 2003 neither a resolution of the Governing Council nor publication in the DOE was necessary to declare a Special Bird Protection Area, but only to fill out the so-called Standardized Data Form. «Already in the year 2000 -explains the promoter-, in the Official Gazette of Extremadura, number 138, a decree was published (232/2000) that classifies several SPAs, and its preamble states verbatim that the classification of these protected spaces corresponds to the Governing Council.

The company maintains that “in 2003, Law 30/1992 was in force, which regulated the common administrative procedure, and which established as a basic rule that any procedure should be communicated to those who could be affected by the administrative action, individualized communication that could be replaced by a publication under certain circumstances. “Administrative actions cannot be carried out in a hidden way, hiding their development from citizens,” defends the promoter of the complex located in El Gordo and Berrocalejo.

“It was just a proposal”

Its informative note adds that “the only act carried out in 2003, to which the environmental associations refer, was a communication from the Director General of the Environment to the Ministry of the Environment, in which what was sent was expressly described as a mere proposal, and therefore, the communication itself expressly recognized that no ZEPA was being declared but simply making a proposal».

“It is difficult to understand how it is intended to convert what the Director General of the Environment himself described as a mere proposal into nothing less than a decision to delimitate the ZEPA, with the relevant consequences that this has,” adds Marina Isla Valdecañas. “Furthermore,” she adds, “the proposal was prepared without competition for it, without making any notification to those affected and without any publication.” “It was, therefore -abundant-, an administrative procedure carried out with the backs of the interested parties and the general public, vitiating said action of radical nullity, as we have shown to the administration itself.”

Regarding the decrees of the years 2012 (approval of the Management Plan of the Valdecañas Reservoir ZEPA) and 2015 (regulation of the Extremadura ZEPA), the company maintains that “in none of these regulations is the ZEPA declared, but in them it is erroneously presumed that said prior declaration has existed. “In fact,” he continues, “we have requested the Junta de Extremadura to correct these errors, or alternatively declare the nullity of these provisions.”

Finally, the promoter affirms that “the environmental associations intend to confuse by equating the LIC Márgenes de Valdecañas with the ZEPA Embalse de Valdecañas.” The first, she affirms, was declared following the established procedure, but “it is a completely different figure, which has nothing to do with the ZEPA.”