THE GREENPEACE environmental organisation yesterday denounced the government’s grant of planning permission to Grecian Bay Hotels of Ayia Napa, to build a 264-bed, five-star hotel in the ecologically fragile Akamas Peninsula.
If Grecian Bay’s pending building permit wins approval, it would mean a second large hotel complex could be erected in the Akamas, a coastal area of Cyprus the government has earmarked, under a World Bank plan, for a National Park.
“This situation is unacceptable,” Greenpeace Mediterranean declared. “The Cyprus government must take responsibility for the destruction being caused in the area,” said Irene Constantinou, Greenpeace representative in Cyprus.
She said Greenpeace planned to take action in the international arena in ways that would affect Akamas tourism.
Greenpeace claims that Cabinet foot-dragging allowed planning permission to be granted to Grecian Bay Hotels last November by the Interior Ministry’s Town Planning Department, despite pledges to “promulgate the relevant legislation” by the end of 1998 to prevent another hotel from going up in the Akamas.
“And the Parliament had already passed the relevant report recommending the Akamas for protective status last year,” Greenpeace added. “That would have made it absolutely illegal for such a building permit to be granted,” it said.
“Once again, the Cyprus cabinet is playing nepotistic games to the detriment of the environment,” Constantinou said, referring to Alecos Michaelides, who was Foreign Minister when planning restrictions were relaxed so his family-owned company, Thanos Hotels, could build the huge Anassa Hotel in the Akamas.
Michaelides was forced to resign from the government in the scandal surrounding the grant of planning permission to build the 352-bed Anassa, and the Supreme Court later ruled the Anassa’s planning permits illegal.
An appeal of that ruling is pending. Meanwhile, the 352-bed Anassa is up and running, and few, if any, think a Court ruling will ever force it to close.
A report by the World Bank and the Mediterranean Environmental Assistance Programme, commissioned by the Cyprus government, concluded no tourist development should take place in the Akamas, and it should be set aside as a National Park.
The Asprokremos area of the Akamas, where the Anassa Hotel is situated, and the Xistarokambos area of the peninsula on the Latchi coast, where the Grecian Bay’s proposed hotel would be built, are close to a nesting ground of the Green Turtle, an endangered species.
Greenpeace said there may be only 225 to 275 nesting female Green Turtles that nest annually in the entire Mediterranean basin, with Cyprus one of the few places there that they still reproduce.
