The plenary session of the City Council of Chelva (Valencia) has provisionally approved the Structural General Plan and all its related documents and has sent the file to the environmental service, so that it can issue the Strategic Environmental and Territorial Declaration. With this agreement, an important milestone is reached in the processing of a plan that was contracted to AUG-ARQUITECTOS SLP in 2019 and that must renew and replace Subsidiary Regulations that date from 1989 and were drafted with growth objectives clearly unaffordable in the present. In fact, at the time of starting the drafting of the Master Plan, there was a large number of vacant lots on sealed land and undeveloped land to be urbanized, which the new plan declassifies.
This planning instrument aims to establish the Chelva development model for the next twenty years from an environmental and economic sustainability perspective, for which it is committed to reducing the land potentially occupyable by urbanization and concentrating development in a small industrial estate with the one that facilitates the dynamization of the local economy and in a small border action in one of the villages of the municipal area.
The plan is adapted to the management limitations of a small municipality, overwhelmed by depopulation and by the existence of a large number of sectoral and territorial limitations, which has forced the protection of most of the territory. An attempt has also been made to reconcile the habitability of the town with the protection of the rich cultural legacy of the town, which led to the declaration of Asset of Cultural Interest of the Historic-Artistic Complex of Chelva and its orchards in 2012. Precisely, the protection of the although it is explained by the need to preserve the urban cornices and the relationship between the built space and the surrounding orchards, of medieval origin, it generated a serious urban problem by entering into contradiction with the delimitation of the land suitable for urbanization, which became unbuildable when the BIC declaration was approved.