Alcaucín Town Hall Launches Urban Planning Scheme Overhaul Alcaucín initiates a full revision of its municipal urban plan to modernise local land rules unchanged since 1995. Planners at Alcaucín Town Hall have begun drafting a new General Urban Development Plan, known locally as the PGOM, in what amounts to the most significant overhaul of the village's zoning rules in a generation. The current framework dates back to 1995, and council officials confirmed this week that replacing it has become unavoidable after years of disputes over property boundaries and stalled building applications. Why a Plan from 1995 No Longer Works Alcaucín sits in the Axarquía foothills, below the slopes of the Sierra de Tejeda, an area that has changed considerably since the mid-1990s. Back then, the municipality drew up zoning rules with little sense of how residential demand, tourism and environmental protections would evolve over the following three decades. The result has been a patchwork of restrictions that no longer reflect how people actually live and build in the area. Scores of detached country houses and rustic smallholdings across the municipality have effectively been stuck in limbo. Many were built or extended without the paperwork now required to register them properly, not through deliberate rule-breaking but because the old plan simply didn't account for how rural settlement patterns developed. Owners, both Spanish families who have held land for generations and foreign buyers who arrived more recently, have found themselves unable to sell, renovate or formalise their properties without running into ambiguous provincial restrictions that predate modern property law. For anyone who has tried to buy or sell a rural finca in this part of the Axarquía, the practical consequences have been obvious: mortgages harder to arrange, renovation permits delayed, and in some cases entire transactions falling through because a property's legal status couldn't be confirmed. Bringing Alcaucín into Line with Andalusian Law The new plan is designed to bring the municipality into full compliance with Andalucía's regional land legislation, the LISTA framework, which governs how urban, rural and protected land is classified across the autonomous community. Under LISTA, rural settlements that already have consolidated infrastructure, access roads, water supply, basic services, can apply for formal recognition rather than being treated indefinitely as irregular developments. In practice, this means Town Hall technicians will need to survey and reclassify land parcel by parcel, distinguishing between genuinely protected rural areas and those where houses, access tracks and utilities have existed long enough to merit legal status. For property owners, the prize at the end of that process is access to utility certifications, structural permits and updated entries in the property registry, the paperwork that turns an informally built house into a fully legal asset that can be mortgaged, insured and sold without complications. What It Means for Investment and Infrastructure Council leaders are framing the revision as more than a legal tidy-up. They expect the new plan to unlock infrastructure projects that have been on hold for years, including bypass roads to ease traffic through the village centre, additional public green space and upgrades to water treatment capacity that the current network was never designed to handle. The argument from Town Hall is straightforward: builders, homeowners and small businesses need clear rules before they commit money to a project. A zoning map riddled with ambiguity discourages exactly the kind of investment that inland villages like Alcaucín need to diversify beyond seasonal tourism. Clarifying what can legally be built, and where, should in theory make it easier for local tradespeople, architects and small developers to plan projects with confidence rather than risking years of legal uncertainty. Next Steps for Residents and Owners The immediate priority now is public consultation. Over the coming months, the Alcaucín Town Hall will hold sessions where residents and property owners can examine the provisional zoning maps before anything is finalised. This stage matters: anyone with land or a house affected by the reclassification will have the chance to flag errors, omissions or boundary disputes before the plan moves to regional authorities for approval. Given the scale of the changes involved, and the fact that similar overhauls elsewhere in Andalucía have often taken years to complete, residents should expect the process to run well into the medium term rather than produce overnight results. For now, those with properties affected by the old 1995 plan would be well advised to start gathering documentation, old permits, utility contracts, land registry extracts, ahead of the consultation period, since that paper trail is likely to prove decisive once the new zoning categories are drawn up.