The City Council inaugurates this Saturday the climbing wall with the presence of professional athletes from all over Andalusia.

The official ceremony, chaired by the mayor, José María García Urbano, will feature exhibitions of members of the Andalusian Selection of Climbing and Para Climbing. It highlights the special participation of Javier Aguilar, visually impaired athlete and Champion of Spain and runner-up in the World Para Climbing.

Estepona City Council will inaugurate this Saturday, March 16, the climbing wall located in the Fair, Sports and Leisure Park Permanent, the largest outdoor equipment of its kind in Spain, which will be a national reference both for its offer for the practice of climbing and for its dimensions. The opening ceremony, chaired by the Mayor, José María García Urbano, will be supported by professional athletes who will debut the facilities through exhibitions open to the public.

The program of activities will begin from 10.00 am with exhibitions of federated athletes, members of the Andalusian Selection of Climbing and Para-climbing, through the Andalusian Federation of Mountain Sports, Climbing and Hiking. About twenty professional climbers and three coaches will participate in the three modalities offered by the climbing wall of Estepona: speed, difficulty and block. Javier Aguilar, Spanish Champion and runner-up in the World Para-Climbing Championship, will be present as a special guest and will give an exhibition and talk about his experience in this sport as one of the great professionals with visual impairment.

The central act of the inauguration will take place at 12.00 hours in which a plaque will be unveiled and will intervene the mayor, José María García Urbano, along with members of the Andalusian Climbing Federation, and athletes.

The day will be completed with Climbing Workshops with the participation of students from high schools in the city invited by the Club Grume.

The climbing wall of Estepona becomes a unique space for the practice of climbing ‘outdoor’, that is, outdoors, and dedicated exclusively to climbing, so it will not have to share space with other sports disciplines. This new facility will have the measures and functionalities that will allow, in addition to the practice of amateur sports, the celebration of national and even international competitions of elite athletes. The construction has been carried out in compliance with the regulatory standards that make this compatibility of uses possible.

Specifically, the climbing wall has been designed for the following practices: difficulty mode, speed mode and block mode. It has a complete surface of 662 square meters, divided for the practice of the different modalities foreseen in this discipline: speed area (115 square meters), difficulty area (363 square meters) and block area (184 square meters).

The structure has two elevations for the development of the sporting activity of different heights on which the loads defined by the specialists in the field have been foreseen, in compliance with the applicable and specific regulations for this sporting activity. For the climbing wall, a high-precision 3D modeling and a self-stable structure of 130 tons of steel with a luminous coating have been used.

The climbing wall required an investment of 1,682,158.94 euros, financed by the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan, funded by the European Union-Next Generation EU. The project is included in the framework of the extraordinary program of tourism sustainability in destinations 2021-2023 in its axis 4 of competitiveness of the Strategic Plan for Sustainable Tourism of Estepona 2022-2024. The Andalusian company Sepisur XXI S.L. has been in charge of executing the works. For the sports equipment, the construction company has chosen the services of the multinational EP Climbing, a Spanish manufacturer with experience in the construction of climbing walls for Olympic Games. The climbing wall model, similar to the one built by this firm for the 2023 Pan American Games in Santiago de Chile and other events in Asia, stands out for its uniqueness and versatility, as it has a large fixed outer structure. For all these reasons, they point out that it is a unique piece of equipment at the national level.

Climbing is currently a booming sport that is perfectly regulated and allows competitions at all levels, in addition to being part of the international Olympic program since 2020. In this context, it is a priority municipal objective to continue complementing the existing sports equipment with the construction of this municipal climbing wall for federated sports practice of all disciplines, as well as championships. The aim is that both amateurs and elite athletes can practice this sport through municipal schools and clubs, or train and compete at any level.

Estepona has increased in the last 12 years the sports facilities with important facilities such as the Fair and Sports Park, where you can practice more than twenty disciplines for free throughout the year, the Athletics Stadium, which has become a benchmark in Andalusia, or the various tracks that have been created both in the neighborhoods and in residential areas of the suburbs.