SOME call it a pothole, others a sinkhole.
Whatever it is, the gaping hollow in a road in La Zenia on the Costa Blanca is still there, more than a week after Priscilla Cromie first reported it to her local town hall.
“We don’t know how far it goes underneath,” says Cromie, 53, an Irish expat who has lived in Orihuela Costa for 26 years. “The cars are still passing over it. It could cave in at any moment.”
That hole in the tarmac, covered by little more than an orange traffic cone, has become an unlikely symbol of an increasingly volatile battle being fought out on this slice of Mediterranean coastline.
A coast divided
A grandmother and former small business owner, she may not fit the classic image of a separatist.
But Cromie, originally from Belfast, is now the general secretary of a political party demanding that her sun-kissed corner of Spain break away entirely from the town hall that governs it.
Orihuela Costa is a sprawling stretch of coastline south of Alicante, home to about 30,000 registered residents – a figure that swells well beyond 100,000 during the peak summer months – made up overwhelmingly of foreign nationals, including British, Irish, Swedish, German and Dutch expat communities.
It falls under the authority of Orihuela, a city some 30 kilometres inland with a fraction of the coast’s housing stock but, campaigners argue, the lion’s share of investment.
The Orihuela Costa Independence Party (PIOC) wants to put that to an end.
Founded by a small group of disgruntled locals in 2022, the party now claims more than 300 paying members and is gunning for its first council seats at elections pencilled in for next year.
The ultimate goal? Full independence and a new name – Costa Campoamor – that banishes the link to Orihuela for good.
The case for change
“It’s not going to happen overnight,” admits Cromie. “The first thing we need to do is get councillors in the next elections, because when we have councillors, we have more of a voice.
“If they are at a plenary hearing in the city, voting for budgets for a museum or a cultural centre – things we don’t have on the coast – we can oppose that and say, ‘If you’re gonna spend €40 million in the city, we want €40 million for the coast’.
“It’s all about equality. We’re a big town now – we’re not what we used to be years ago.”
The numbers behind the anger are stark.
According to the PIOC, Orihuela Costa is home to roughly 60,000 properties, compared with around 30,000 across the rest of the municipality, and delivers roughly 60 per cent of its total revenue.
However, it receives less than a third of the investment dished out by officials at the town hall.
That shortfall, the PIOC argues, has left the coast desperately short of essential infrastructure including schools and health centres – and without even its own Guardia Civil station.
“I’ve been here 26 years and I’ve had children go to school here,” Cromie explains. “When we first came here, my son was one, and there was no school for him.”
Her children were taught in temporary prefab classrooms in Los Dolses while a permanent school was built, but more than two decades on, the area’s children are back in prefabs again.
“Twenty years. There’s been no progress in twenty years,” she says.
That experience sowed the seeds of her discontent, which deepened during the pandemic when, she says, vital aid from the town hall quickly dried up and former colleagues were forced to rely on food banks to survive.
The man at the helm
Roman Jimenez, PIOC’s Spanish-born president, moved to the coast in 2006 and became similarly frustrated after watching the same promises go unfulfilled year after year.
“At the beginning, we thought it was okay – that the town hall needed time to give us proper services,” he says.
“We talked to the councillors, explained things, and they kept promising things. But then we realised they were not fulfilling their promises.”
A deep thinker, Jimenez believes his movement has the weight of history on its side.
“Some 500 years ago, Orihuela was enormous, but it always had the same problem – they thought about themselves only,” he explains.
“So roughly every 40 years, a part of Orihuela becomes independent. Torrevieja belonged to Orihuela. So did Guardamar del Segura, Callosa de Segura, Bigastro, San Miguel – all of these places.
“They had the same problem before, and that’s why they became independent. Now we have the same problem, and we want the same solution.
“We think it would be much better to have two towns, Orihuela Costa and Orihuela City, with the little hamlets attached to the city. It would be much easier to deliver services properly.”
His campaign may seem an audacious undertaking, but Jimenez speaks with the unshakeable conviction of someone who believes his party can make it happen.
For that, he draws encouragement from the handful of communities who have proven it is possible, breaking away from larger municipalities to form their own.
Take Usansolo in the Basque Country, for example, which became the 113th municipality of Bizkaia province as recently as 2023 after tearing itself away from Galdako.
The numbers game
Jimenez is delighted with the party’s progress so far and bullish about its future electoral prospects, confidently predicting the party could win four or five seats at the next municipal election, next year.
That could be enough to make the party a kingmaker in Orihuela’s 25-seat town hall if neither the PSOE nor PP secure an all-important outright majority.
If that happens, Jimenez will have his uniquely international membership to thank.
Of the roughly 300 paying members, he estimates that just 60 are Spanish, with around 100 British or Irish and the rest drawn from Germany, France, Scandinavia and beyond
“People say, ‘Oh you’re not a Spanish town. But no – we don’t want to be,” he says.
“This is an international town with plenty of nationalities. With a little English or a little Spanish, you can have great conversations with neighbours who come from all over the world.”
Counterintuitively, Brexit has been a big helping hand in building that base.
Many British residents had spent years living on the coast while retaining formal ties to the UK.
But Brexit posed a bureaucratic conundrum, prompting some to formalise their Spanish residency and become more engaged with life on the other side of the order.
By registering with the padrón, many British expats now have a stake in municipal elections and an important reason to care.
Jimenez has built on that, recruiting Brits not simply as potential voters but as fully paid-up members building up a Spanish political party from the bottom up.
“Slowly, people understand it’s important to participate in local politics,” he says, “because they know the schools and security situation is deteriorating and they want those services.”
Which can surely only be a good thing, whether you want Orihuela Costa to become Costa Campoamor or not.
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