Lagos may soon stop being the only town in Portugal that doesn’t have its own municipal urban development plan (PDM).
For the last few weeks, a draft PDM has been available for public discussion on the council’s website (www.cm-lagos.pt), welcoming comments and opinions from local residents and entities. The PDM is also available for consultation at the town hall until March 4.
If all goes according to plan, the PDM which sets the guidelines for urbanisation within the municipality could be approved and in place by “mid 2015”, Lagos mayoress Joaquina Matos has told Lusa news agency.
It would mean the end of a 12-year period without a PDM due to a court decision which suspended the last plan due to what it termed “a council error” in 1994.
As Nuno Marques from CCDR Algarve told Público newspaper, Lagos has tried to follow the guidelines of the POOC, REN and RAN plans for the past 12 years, though many projects – most notably Match Algarve, the €110 million state-of-the-art football village planned for the countryside near Bensafrim, Lagos – have been put on hold due to the lack of a PDM.
As mayor Matos explained, the draft plan has had CCDR Algarve approval, and she has every reason to believe it will be approved by Lagos’ municipal assembly once the period for public discussion is over.
As the Resident reported in 2013 (see story: https://www.portugalresident.com/lagos-president-%E2%80%9Coutraged%E2%80%9D-by-bureaucratic-delays), the PDM was suspended in 1996, two years after it had formulated certain regulations for a piece of land which was later considered a ‘green space’. Since this was not discussed publically, the owner of the land contested the decision and eventually won the case in 2002.
At the time, ex-mayor Júlio Barroso said the bureaucratic details that stalled the creation of a new PDM left him feeling “tired and outraged”.
