The same picture is repeated up and down the coastline, in Santa Pola, Guardamar and especially Orihuela Costa, but it would now appear that the Torrevieja Council has had enough. This week they have asked the National Police to become involved, using their immigration powers on those illicit traders, mainly of Senegalese nationality, who are in the country illegally.
Every year their presence is repeated on the Torrevieja promenade along the seafront promenades, a long line of street vendors without a license to trade, manteros, who during the months of July and August take over the area from the beginning of the promenade in Hombre del Mar to the end of the Avenida de los Marineros on La Playa del Cura.
On the other side of the walkway, the occupation by tables and chairs of the hospitality industry that, in many cases, takes advantage of the lack of municipal control to occupy much more of an area than that to which they are entitled.
Between both activities, a central corridor with a thread of passers-by trying to move along between those who stop to buy counterfeit products and those who consume their food and drink whilst sitting on the terraces, a narrow corridor that in some sections of the promenade is only a metre or two wide.
The promenade is an area of transit under the responsibility of the Generalitat and the General Directorate of Coasts, which has been looking the other way for many years.
Federico Alarcón, Torrevieja Councillor for Security, explained that to deal with this situation that occurs daily and which intensifies in the high season, the municipality will now undertake specific action.
Initially he will issue the sub-delegate of the Government in Alicante, Araceli Poblador, with an extensive photographic report carried out by the City Council on the situation. He will do so at the local security meeting scheduled for next week, which the sub-delegation is expected to attend along with commanders of the Local Police, the Civil Guard, National Police, and Autonomous Police, which usually intensifies its presence during the summer.
In addition, Alarcón has requested the express collaboration of the National Police to intensify the immigration controls on those street vendors that trade without a license, for the most part of Senegalese origin.
Another of the measures being considered is the display of billboards warning of the penalties to anyone who buys such counterfeit products.
At the moment and surveillance is limited to the periods when the Local Police and Civil Guard patrols are free of other services and can patrol on foot along the promenade.
