Loulé’s planned commercial cluster – “a crime”

So says António Massapina, the architect for CISED Território, the company hired by the national association of young businessmen (ANJE) to elaborate a study on the best of two options for the location of a “commercial cluster” in Loulé.

It’s already common knowledge that IKEA and Grupo Auchan mean to invest millions in the borough of Loulé.

Initially, this was to have been a joint investment in one sole location – near the Loulé central junction, on land adjoining the old UNICER factory.

But property interests put off the two retail giants and turned IKEA’s attention to Loulé South, a site close to Parque das Cidades, where the new Central Hospital of the Algarve is planned - a development that couldn’t cope with intense traffic in the future.

On the other side, there’s the Caliços stream “one of the few ecological corridors of the region”.