There is a carob factory on the way to the new São Brás de Alportel Business Park, located in the Lower Mosque. The detailed plan of this new business area has been approved and entered into force in August and there are interested in settling in the place. A company in the municipality already has an approved application to install a 2nd carob processing unit there, which will allow it to move up a step in the value creation chain of this endemic product in the Algarve.
“We are planning to install a carob processing unit. There is a company here in the county that is going to make a large investment – it already has an approved application – in a factory that allows for another type of transformation, since at the moment it only does the crushing», he revealed to Sul Informação Victor Warrior.
«It will be a very important unit to value this product here in the region. And others will come», assured the São Brasense mayor.
The approval of the Detailed Plan for the new Business Zone was one of the measures highlighted by the São Brasense city council, led by the socialist Vítor Guerreiro, in a balance of the first year of the current mandate, made this Thursday. But the choice of the location, the Lower Mosque, is far from being consensual and there were even requests from the Al-Portel heritage defense association for the location of this area to be revised.
The suggestion was made in the context of the public consultation of the plan that has been approved and that was published in Diário da República on the 17th of August. In June, Al-Portel publicly challenged the progress of the plan, as planned.
The president of Al-Portel Gonçalo Gomes, speaking to the Sul Informação, questioned the choice of the Lower Mosque, «one of the emblematic settings of the Algarve Barrocal», to install this new business area. In addition to being a “populated and archaeologically interesting” area, the site chosen for the infrastructure is located on land “with high permeability of underground aquifers”, which is not consistent with industrial uses.
On the other hand, «there is still a lot of space available in other business and industrial areas of the municipality». “Why commit more space for a use that is not even close to being sold out and that it is not expected that it will be?”, asks Gonçalo Gomes.
Another issue raised by the association was the approval of this plan “in default of the Municipal Master Plan”, currently under review. The association asked, therefore, to stop "to think" and not move forward to approve the plan, which ended up happening about two months later.
Vítor Guerreiro does not agree with this position of the São Brasense heritage defense association, even considering it “absurd” to criticize the location chosen for the new business district.
“That site is close by and involves a large ALGAR waste recovery unit, which was placed there by the Government and the Chamber had no say. She was simply warned and couldn't say anything. The plan for the São Brás de Alportel Business Park was a ten-year aspiration, which we finally managed to approve», he told the Sul Informação the mayor of São Brás de Alportel, on the sidelines of the session in which the balance of the first year in office was made.
«This business area is a project that is more than ten years old. Criticizing your installation in that location is something that, for me, doesn't make any sense, it's absurd. Not approving this project now was throwing the county's future economic development into the trash,” he defended.
Vítor Guerreiro also guaranteed that the recently approved business area «will only accommodate non-polluting industries». “It will be a business park. The biggest industry, which is already there and we have been trying to monitor it closely, is the ALGAR unit itself».
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