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The Impact of the Construction of a New Hotel in Gandarinha Is Causing Unease
13 May 2018
After four decades of abandonment, the former Casa da Gandarinha is slated to be transformed into the Turim Sintra Palace Hotel. The development has caused some unease among residents who fear that the Cultural Landscape of Sintra will be defaced, right at the entrance to the village’s historic centre.
The ruins of the have been an eyesore on the landscape of the village of Sintra for more than four decades. So, when bulldozers appeared there in the last months of last year, it did not go unnoticed by anyone heading from the Sabuga Fountain to São Pedro de Penaferrim or from São Pedro to the centre of the village. A four-star hotel, a unit with “100 luxurious rooms, overlooking the idyllic Sintra Mountains,” 500 square meters of conference rooms and a parking area with 137 public and paid parking spaces are now being built on the site.
The Turim hotel chain plans to rebuild the nineteenth-century façade and build two “contemporary structures” for rooms and services, both of which are under construction next door to the one-hundred-year-old house and are due to be completed next year. But for this, it was necessary to dig into the mountain range, which caught the attention of the locals, who began to warn against the cutting of trees and the demolition of old walls, claiming that these interventions were damaging part of the cultural landscape of Sintra, classified as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.
Besides this classification, the house is in the Special Protection Zone of the Castle of the Moors, Cistern and Church of Santa Maria. Given the land excavation, hydrogeological studies should have been carried out, and the work should have had archaeological accompaniment, they pointed out. However, Público was unable to find evidence of either of these in the application for development submitted to the local city council.
The Directorate General of Cultural Heritage now says that the archaeological studies took place in the first quarter of the year. The city council stressed that “all the authorisations that led to the project licensing and the developer’s permissions were evaluated and granted by governments that preceded the current mayor’s administration” which, “in light of the recently revealed information, has decided to open an inquiry into the matter.” Público is still waiting for clarifications by the developer.
The original house was built in 1888 by the Conde da Penha Longa to serve as a hotel but was donated by the Viscondessa da Gandarinha, in her will, to be used by a social support institution – for protection of orphaned girls – until 1974. The property then fell into abandonment and ruins, until it was sold to Urbibarra in 1997. From then on, the history of the recovery of the property is convoluted.
20 years of advances and retreats
The first project for the construction of a hotel in Gandarinha was approved in 1998, and construction started in 1999 before the application had received final approval and without having consulted the Portuguese Institute of Architectural and Archaeological Heritage (Ippar). Faced with the start of construction, Ippar objected to the venture, stating in May 1999 that any intervention on the site would have to comply with two conditions: “Maintenance of the existing morphology, with no profound changes to its profile resulting from excavation, landfill or construction” and “the definition of an overall objective proposal, taking into account the importance of maintaining the predominant of plant cover.”
The construction subsequently stopped and in July 2003, with Fernando Seara as mayor, the developer submitted a new project, which is based, according to an addition to the descriptive text subscribed in August 2005 by the author of the project, in the municipality’s “very clear” guidelines on parking requirements. In the new proposal, the planned number of rooms doubled, and the number of parking spaces rose from 76 to 137, spread over three underground floors.
Ippar then rejected this second proposal in February 2004. Following the rejection, the developer made several changes to the project. However, Ippar maintained its reservations and failed to adopt a definitive stance on the project.
The municipality’s consulting architect (which had already endorsed the initial project) issued a new opinion on November 8, 2004, in which it considered that the project “is, in principle, capable of being approved,” provided that the “alteration and adaptation of the local road to the conditions and directions of circulation” proves to be “technically feasible.” Additional technical doubts also related to the excavation “on a hillside whose slope has a 60% grade and in which there may be a considerable amount of groundwater.”
Saying that the proposed solution “seems justified by the availability of public parking places, at the request of the city council”, the consultant stated that he considers the excavation to be “worrisome” and proposed that a “geotechnical study” be requested to assess any risks. However, he added that “in principle, the present stage of the project is capable of approval.”
Two weeks after the receiving the consultant’s opinion, the technician of the Department of Urbanism in charge of designing the project signed a statement to the effect that “the number of floors and the spacing of buildings” may not “comply with all of the provisions of the plan [Sintra’s Urbanization Plan].” The technician maintained that, given the “scale of the project and the site’s sensitivity,” that Ippar’s “final approval” for excavations should be obtained.
In relation to area’s natural heritage, he argued that “the process should include a hydrogeological study that can determine what would happen with the groundwater and its possible implications for the springs that exist in the surrounding terrain.”
Finally, with regard to the proposed changes to EN 249, the statement reads that “there should be a proposal by the Traffic Division to the municipal executive, considering such issues such as circulation, parking, and the relation of the property’s entrances and exits to an increase in traffic.”
On June 21, 2005, following a meeting between the hotel’s designers, architects, the developer, two representatives from Ippar and four from the Sintra city council, Ippar communicated to the local authority its “conditional approval” of the project, given the explanations provided by the developer and changes to the project. However, it reiterated the need to carry out hydrogeological studies.
At the end of July 2005, the division head of the Department of Urbanism proposed that the project be approved, although the presentation of hydrogeological studies by the developer and the municipal executive’s approval of a proposal by the Traffic Division on traffic and parking issues had not yet been completed.
In September 2005, the developer presented a two-page traffic study, signed by one of the project’s architects. The proposal was not submitted for approval by the municipal executive, as suggested by the Department of Urbanism’s technician but was accepted by the director of the Department of Municipal Works on September 21, 2005. On September 30th, the mayor of Sintra approved the project.
Council opened inquiry
In May 2007, Attorney General Fernando Gomes sent an “urgent” letter to the mayor asking him to “state whether the local authority can restore the legality, by administrative means, to the proceedings [of the Gandarinha hotel], since the act of licensing dated September 30, 2005, contains a violation of various urban planning provisions, in particular, the Sintra Urbanization Plan.” These infringements refer to the height and distance of the construction relative to the adjoining road.
In response, the municipality stated that, because it is a “proposal to expand construction, preserving part of the existing building (…) and understanding the urban operation in question as a reconstruction operation (…) the number of floors and structures already present in that space were not worsened.”
With regard to an increased distance between new buildings and the road to the rear road (Calçada dos Clérigos), the municipality stated that it was not necessary to apply the 10-meter distance laid out in the plan, since “the construction, in general, is further removed.” In the city council’s proceedings to which the Público had access, there is no information regarding the attorney general’s response to these explanations.
In the meantime, a court dispute arose between the developer and the city council. In January 2008, the developer filed a lawsuit with the Administrative and Fiscal Tribunal of Sintra, requesting that the municipality approve the application for permission to build the hotel. In the course of this proceedings, the Public Prosecutor’s Office argued that the approval of the architectural project was null and void because it did not comply with the Sintra Urbanization Plan, as Attorney General Fernando Gomes had understood in 2007, but the court did accept the argument.
In June 2010, the court’s final decision was made in favour of the city council. Fernando Seara approved the decision on January 10, 2011. In the following years, the developer requested successive extensions of the deadlines for requesting the issuance of construction permits and for the payment of the fees due. The license was eventually issued in May 2016. In January 2017, the developer Urbibarra sold the property to Quinta do Bispo SA, a company based in Portimão.
The works to transform the old Casa da Gandarinha into the Turim Sintra Palace Hotel started with excavations in that mountain slope, and there are still no references to in the approvals by the city council to the studies that had been requested Ippar (now DGPC).
At an executive meeting in December, the alderman Pedro Ventura (CDU) questioned whether the work was being done with archaeological accompaniment. “I had the opportunity to verify that the construction involves a significant excavation of land,” the communist councillor said, stressing that the World Heritage Charter requires the archaeological accompaniment of the work. In response, the deputy mayor of the municipality, Rui Pereira, reported that he would request information on the issue raised by the communist.
The chamber emphasised to Público that ” all the authorisations that led to the project licensing and the developer’s permissions were evaluated and granted by governments that preceded the current mayor’s administration, who has decided to open an inquiry into the matter” to be completed by June.
Regarding the monitoring of the works by archaeologists, the DGPC confirms to Público that “land excavations were started without any measures to safeguard the archaeological heritage,” and the archaeological work was only authorised on January 18 and concluded on March 27.
However, construction continues. “No one would be against making a hotel there, on the contrary, everyone in Sintra and its visitors should rejoice over the recovery of that site that was abandoned so many years ago. However, the project has turned out to be massive, hopelessly disfiguring an iconic path through the historic centre of Sintra,” the Q Sintra citizens movement lamented.
Original Story: Público – Cristiana Faria Moreira
Translation: Richard Turner