The mayor of Mijas, Josele González (PSOE), and the councillors for Social Services and Public Roads, Hipólito Zapico (PSOE) and Nicolás Cruz (PSOE), with the president of the Afesol Foundation, Cristian González, have signed a collaboration agreement this Monday between the Mijas Town Hall and the Afesol Foundation, to control the parking of vehicles at various points in the municipality. “We have been collaborating for years with this group that works with families with people with mental health problems, giving public spaces for them to manage and thus providing a job opportunity for the users within the group. Now, we are taking a further step in this line of collaboration with an agreement signed with the Afesol Foundation to manage the car parks on the beach of El Bombo, the llano in La Cala, which will include the caravan area, the El Puerto quarry and the Boulevard of La Cala.

With this we are not only going to regulate parking in these areas but also make them safer thanks to the control of these eight Afesol users”, explained the mayor.   According to González, Mijas is “a reference in terms of social policies related to mental health. Working with Afesol allows us to help the almost 400 families in Mijas who are part of this group. From the Mijas Town Hall we will continue to work closely with them through agreements like this one or grants like the ones we award every year so that they can continue to carry out essential work in our municipality”.

For his part, Zapico stressed that “from the Social Services area we are collaborating with Afesol not only through the transfer of the management of public spaces but also through important subsidies that allow them, among other things, to generate employment for people with mental health problems, a group that has difficulties to find work. Not in vain, in recent years we have made a contribution of around 80,000 euros on average depending on the programmes presented to us, and this has allowed them to maintain their activity during the pandemic, when they had no other type of income”.

Objectives The collaboration agreement signed between the Mijas Town Hall and the Afesol Foundation has two objectives: on the one hand, the employability and consequent social and labour insertion of people with mental illness in the municipality and, on the other hand, the improvement of traffic, parking and mobility of vehicles in the areas surrounding the plots enabled. “The Mijas Town Hall had detected certain deficiencies in the control and security of these areas of La Cala and Mijas Pueblo. With this agreement, we will improve the traffic conditions in these car parks where a lot of vehicles congregate, not only during the summer period but throughout the year”, explained Cruz, a two-year agreement that also establishes “the possibility of including new areas when extraordinary events take place such as concerts or sporting events”.

In total, eight people will receive training from the Local Police to “regulate traffic and parking for a symbolic price”, says the president of the foundation, Cristian González, who is grateful because Mijas “is a very sensitive municipality for people with mental health problems”. Not in vain, the town has ceded other spaces to the foundation such as “the Museum of Miniatures or the Torreón de La Cala, where we have five workstations”.

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