As the four and five storey apartment buildings started to come out of the ground the owners of the adjoining homes saw their worst nightmares come true. The reality of the windowless walls that grew daily before their eyes, over-shadowing their gardens, was considerable worse than the vision the promoters plans had conveyed to them months earlier.
It was patent that the long term plan was to force the owners of the individual homes on the block to sell so that the town hall’s plan for the urbanisation plan for Hendaye’s centre, according to the PLU, could start.
The question people began to ask themselves was: who had decided that Hendaye be transformed into a transnational urban centre, a satellite of the Spanish town of Irun, and why? That the town should have good roads and lighting, schools and crèches was one thing, but to convert the sleepy town into a dormitory extension for northern Guipizcoa was another. It was not unlike the incinerator, or the extension of the San Sebastian airport. All that seemed to matter was politicians’ desires for self aggrandisement, steamrollering through costly plans, with little considerations to the long term, giving little consideration to the wishes of their electors, who they persistently duped, leading them into a labyrinth of left-right-ecologist political ideology, which obscured their confused goals, in any case were far removed from local citizens needs.
Vinxento Bolloqui was a typical of a certain style of Frenchman, a bantam cock, proud, strutting, well groomed and ambitious. He had just been elected mayor of Hendaye, promising a clean sweep after years of political squabbling and stagnation in the small town.
The PLU had been drawn up with a view to transforming the town in the same way as the railway had metamorphosed it the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1840 there were just five hundred kilometres of railway in France, five times less than in Great Britain. That soon changed and by 1860 the number of kilometres built had jumped twenty fold, doubling again by 1880. By the end of the century France had overtaken Great Britain.
Railways came late to Spain. During the nineteenth century it was one of the poorest and least economically developed countries in Europe. As France developed its colonial empire, Spain suffered a disastrous economic decline with the loss of its colonies, which ended in the Spanish-American war of 1898.
However, in penisula’s north-west, Bilbao and its region was transformed into an industrialised powerhouse thanks to its iron and coal deposits. Further to the north, San Sebastian, because of its mild climate, was chosen by Alphonse XII as the monarchy’s summer residence, following the example set by Napoleon III in nearby Biarritz. As a result the Spanish ruling class and the diplomatic corps established residences in the summer capital bringing prosperity to San Sebastian.
Less than one hundred metres from Hendaye’s town hall the construction of the largest and perhaps most technically complex project ever seen in the small municipality had commenced. The site quickly became the principal subject of local gossip, a favourite spot for the old men of the town to stop and complain of their local politicians’ foolhardiness by embarking on such a vast undertaking. Once the heavy construction machinery moved in and excavations began the sound of pile drivers and mechanical shovels drowned out the noise of the high speed trains arriving from, or departing to Paris, more than eight hundred kilometres to the north.
For Hendaye, the construction site was on an almost pharaonic scale: four hundred metres in length and sixty metres wide, and a depth of twenty metres. The last time the town had seen construction of a comparable scale had been in the nineteen-eighties with the marina and its beachfront development; a couple of kilometres distance from the old town. This time however the engineering was something else, not only was it situated in the heart of the old town, but the development was to span the railway. In effect, Grupo Martínez Construcciones planned to cover the tracks with a massive superstructure capable of carrying three hundred and fifty apartments, parking areas, a shopping centre, and a new road to replace the bridge that linked both parts of the town.
Their civil engineers had designed a structure consisting of massive supporting walls in reinforced concrete situated on each side of the railway tracks to bear the one hundred and eighty pre-stressed concrete cross-beams that spanned the tracks, each forty metres long by one metre wide and one and a half metres high, designed to carry the weight of the planned apartment building.
The construction crews commenced by excavating a broad area on each side of the tracks, then hundreds of ten metre long piles in the form of steel tubes were driven into the ground and filled with concrete in order to reinforce the foundations. The cross-beams were delivered on long low-loaders, two or three at a time, and were swung into place by huge mobile cranes with hydraulically retractable booms, requiring a full day for each operation.
The old bridge, the highest of the town centre’s two bridges, offered a grandstand view of the site and daily progress was observed by old men in their black Basque berets with nothing better to do other than give a running commentary to any curious passer-by who cared to listen, dispensing their newly acquired technical expertise on the different aspects of the construction work, before returning home for lunch to bore their uncomplaining wives with the latest details.
The man in the street was unaware of the economic priorities fixed by the ambitious occupants of the town hall. Certain spoke of the mayor’s ambition to counterbalance their more populous neighbours and partners, thus gleaning a more influential role in the cross border Consortio’s decisions. His plan included a construction programme to build sufficient new homes with a view to increasing his municipalities population and therefore its political importance, not only within the Consortio, but vis-à-vis St Jean de Luz and Biarritz, a few kilometres to the north. Hendaye’s smarter northern neighbours had always looked down on the town as nothing more than a border freight and railway terminal, with its workers and functionaries overseeing the — now obsolete — customs and border posts.
Until the opening of the frontier Hendaye had been the destination of a regular flow of vacationers, many were Parisian’s; owners of second homes, campers, and in more recent years those who owned leisure boats anchored in the marina. In addition there were the day-trippers to the beach, then a quick visit to the Spanish side of the frontier, where wines, spirits, cigarettes were considerably cheaper, and where before returning they could fill their tanks with low priced gas.
Bloomberg