Benidorm twin towers face 2029 demolition as flat owners await payout

Owners of the 168 flats inside Gemelos 28 are finally getting a price on homes they could lose to demolition. Yet nine years after judges first ordered Benidorm’s twin towers torn down, the regional government is racing to find a way to save them instead.

A ten-year-old ruling is only now being priced

For the people who own one of Gemelos 28’s 168 flats, the wait for an answer has already stretched past a decade. Spain’s Supreme Court ruled back in July 2012 that the permit allowing the twin 21-storey towers to be built on Benidorm’s seafront was illegal, after finding the blocks eat into protected coastal land.

Since then, courts confirmed they’d have to knock the towers down. What’s taken years longer to sort out is how much the 168 flat owners, plus the owners of 157 garages and storage units and a shop and sports hall inside the complex, should be paid for their properties. 

Valuers move in on 327 properties

That job finally landed with Valmesa, a Benidorm-based valuation firm, after the regional government (the Generalitat) awarded it the contract at the end of December 2025. Valmesa spent the first few months of this year working out exactly who owns what inside the towers, and is now moving through the harder task of putting a euro figure on each property.

The formula works its way back to what owners paid when they bought, plus a fixed 20 per cent uplift, based in each case on 2012 property values and then adjusted for this year’s cost of living. It’s expected to leave the regional government looking at a bill of around €100 million. Results were originally pencilled in for later this year, though officials have already said 2027 is just as likely.

A rescue plan could still change everything

None of that means the towers are definitely coming down. Since March 2026, the Generalitat has had a separate plan sitting with Spain’s Ministry for Ecological Transition in Madrid, to extend Benidorm’s Poniente and Levante seafront promenades far enough to redraw where the protected coastal boundary actually falls, potentially taking Gemelos 28 out of the danger zone altogether. 

Madrid hasn’t replied yet. Regional officials have said they’ll press ahead regardless, launching an international design competition worth almost €50 million before the end of the year, with a winning design due in the first quarter of 2027. It wouldn’t be the first rescue attempt to go nowhere either, a 2025 push to have Congress rewrite Spain’s coastal law specifically to save the towers hasn’t resulted in any change. 

What happens next

A firm court deadline still stands, with judges setting October 2029 as the date demolition must begin if nothing changes before then.

For now, owners are stuck holding flats that could either be torn down for a payout or saved by a promenade that doesn’t exist yet, the sort of limbo that leaves ‘why bother fixing anything up’ as a fair question every time something in the flat needs repairing.