- The Wesenauer family asks a court to suspend the construction of nine homes until September, in response to a Seprona report
“It’s like living in Gaza,” Kim Wesenauer looks helplessly from the door of the Finca Langostina. Once again, they are surrounded by a landscape of concrete.
Since the developer Praxa took possession of their old garden last May, in just a matter of weeks a high wall built and, now, the construction works are progressing if nine homes with pools next to this traditional house, one of the last standing exponents of dryland agriculture on the Oriola coast and, according to two studies by the University of Alicante and the former municipal archaeologist, with elements that are in need of protection
The future of Finca Langostina is thus going through a delicate impasse. After being arrested twice, the sisters, Kim and Love, and their mother, Gabriele are now accused of resistance to authority by trying to obstruct a court order, while on the other side of the wall the same excavator to which they were previously chained now moves across the ground without restriction.
The tremors are felt in the house every time it moves. Love points her finger at damage to the ceiling in her room. “I can’t sleep here anymore and now I have to sleep in the living room.”
However, what worries them most are the swallow nests that are in the old stable and now the garage of the house. A Seprona report, prior to the building work requested the Court not to use heavy machinery and even suggested that the works stop until September. Something that, in a fax, was also later requested by the Environmental Prosecutor’s Office.
They hope that the works can stop for a while to protect these endangered birds. It is their last hope to buy more time while, they say, they take their case to Europe in search of the protection that the Spanish courts have failed to provide.
Casa Langostina was acquired by the family, of Austrian origin, in the 90s with access from the Lomas de Don Juan urbanization, however, and by virtue of an autonomous urban planning law that is no longer in force, part of the land (gardens) was included within the PAU-25 and taken from the Wesenauer against their will.
After a first attempt by the current developer, owned by the former president of Real Murcia, Víctor Gálvez, to start construction in December, the Council finally granted the building license in February. Kim denounced that, for this permit, “the endorsement of a company that does not have permission to operate in Spain was presented.”
Likewise, the family also denounces that the boundaries of the new wall do not coincide in their coordinates with the wall that was first erected in 2020, while they were absent and confined due to the pandemic. The new blind wall, they say, greatly exceeds two metres in height at several points.
The Orihuela Council, like the developer, insist that the sentences certify that the land no longer belongs to the Wesenauer. Even the councillor for Urban Planning, Matías Ruiz, who promised to initiate the file to declare the house as an Asset of Local Relevance, has somehow changed his stance.
