The socialist Odón Elorza, mayor of San Sebastián between 1991 and 2011, left politics in January 2023 after renouncing his membership in Congress.
Since then, he has accentuated his civic activism and has become a kind of defender of lost causes.
His latest crusade is directed against an urban planning operation that he describes as “speculative” and “privatizing” in the heart of the Gipuzkoa capital.
He has decided to launch a fight against the current city councilor, Eneko Goia, of the PNV, whom he accuses of allowing the construction of “a commercial artifact” in a space in San Sebastián protected as a cultural asset.
Elorza denounces the “lack of transparency” and the “diversion of power” of the City Council in the urban intervention that it has approved in the area of San Bartolomé Hill, an emblematic hill that contains many centuries of San Sebastian history and is located about 250 meters from La Concha beach.
The local government gave the green light in January 2023, with the votes of the PNV and the PSE-EE, to the transformation of the San Bartolomé hill and allow the construction of a new commercial area.
It is planned to open a shopping center and parking lot with nine floors (four above ground and five underground) with a total area of 8,000 square meters of tertiary activity.
“I maintain that a green area considered part of the historical heritage of San Bartolomé will be eliminated,” says former mayor Elorza, who adds: “The artifact that will emerge will be an example of municipal speculation, lack of transparency and inconsistency with the objective of low emissions zone, as the new shopping center needs to attract traffic to do business.”
This month of February the excavators have entered the area to carry out archaeological tastings because it is an area of archaeological presumption.
The machines have to drill into the ground to check if any historical vestiges of the city are preserved in the hidden soil.
Similar works allowed the ruins of a large convent from the 17th and 18th centuries to emerge in 2014, with two cloisters and other monastic rooms, as well as around twenty tombs from various periods, the oldest from the 13th.
An urban planning operation was carried out on the hill years ago that allowed the creation of 500 homes in the Amara Viejo neighborhood, the remodeling and expansion of a school and the rehabilitation of the old Bath House.
The controversy now focuses on a new intervention to embed a shopping center in the lower part of the hill that will be promoted by the Basque investment fund Midfield Capital.
To carry out this work (an investment of 50 million euros is expected) it will be necessary to demolish the current wall that holds the hill, 29 meters high from Easo Street, and reconstruct it respecting its current appearance once the supermarket work is finished. .
Two neighborhood associations (Amara Bai and Erdian Bizi) and another of merchants from the city center (Dendartean) have also risen up against this intervention, which have filed an appeal before the Superior Court of Justice of the Basque Country to paralyze the controversial project.
They criticize “the complete denaturalization and artificialization of the environment” if the commercial plan is finally carried out, for which the final construction license has not yet been approved.
“The activity of the excavators,” the neighbors and merchants say in a joint statement, “can only be understood as a fait accompli maneuver to induce people to think that once the mountain has been destroyed, it is better to build a shopping center.”
Mayor Goia has defended the legality of the project on several occasions and insisted that the San Bartolomé Special Plan that allows the operation is “the last piece that remains to be executed” in the planned urban development in the area.
“The slope of San Bartolomé cannot remain like this, it must be completed,” the councilor has even said.
The renovation of this environment, which has accumulated 12 years of renovations, is made up of “many pieces” and “to say that we don't like the last part is complicated from the point of view of sustainability.”
Neighbors and merchants, on the other hand, emphasize that the new commercial area will lead to “harmful effects” on retail commerce in the downtown area, will have negative effects on pollution due to increased traffic, in addition to “distorting” the current state. of the wall of Saint Bartholomew.
The San Bartolomé wall where the future shopping center will be located, in San Sebastián.JH
Former mayor Elorza is in tune with this vision.
The former socialist deputy believes that the construction of the aforementioned shopping center will bring “harmful consequences for the general interest.”
For this reason, in April of last year he filed a complaint “as a citizen of San Sebastián” before Ararteko (the Basque Ombudsman) after not obtaining a response to a letter that he had previously presented to the Mayor's Office.
He gave the
ombudsman
“200 pages with arguments” in the face of “Goia's silence” regarding his requests.
Elorza has written these days on his personal blog that the future commercial building “will invade the hillside and privatize green areas”: “We will witness a large excavation of 42 meters, the disappearance of the bus lane in a section of Easo Street and the elimination of 25 linear meters of the protected wall.”
And he states: “Citizen mobilization cannot wait.”