Pativel wins the day as Supreme Court reverses a 2021 Valencia ruling

THE Valencian Community’s Green Infrastructure Territorial Action Plan (Pativel) has been reinstated.

On May 5, Spain’s Supreme Court reversed a ruling by the Valencian Region’s Upper Court of Justice (TSJCV) which annulled Pativel in 2021.

Introduced to protect the region’s remaining stretches of undeveloped coastal land and approved by decree in May 2018, the law was welcomed by some town halls but rejected by others.

In February last year, the TSJCV upheld an appeal from a company based in the Valencia region.  This maintained that the law was passed without an economic-financial survey of the cost of implementing Pativel or the repercussions of de-classifying land amongst other factors.

The Valencia tribunal also agreed that the project did not comply with Equality laws owing to the absence of a report on Pativel’s effects on issues involving gender, childhood, adolescence and family life.

The Generalitat’s lawyers argued that Pativel was limited to the use of land and the activities permitted on that land, which did not require an outlay of “public costs.”

The legal team also pointed out that a Supreme Court ruling in February 2016 on Galicia’s Coastal Planning Plan (POL) considered that “not all territorial plans needed always, and in every case” the type of surveys and reports cited by the TSJCV.