An environment NGO has urged the Planning Authority to save an old farmhouse and adjoining area in Fgura, a town which has no open spaces and hardly any old structures.

The farmhouse is some 200 years ago but is risking demolition, with an application having been filed for its replacement by modern structures, the NGO Flimkien Ghal Ambjent Aħjar said.

In 1995 Fgura Local Council had won Grade 3 protection for the farmhouse. It had expressed its wish to restore the building and transform the farm into a much-needed public cultural centre and green open space.

"The significance of this site lies in the fact that these the last fields and trees to exist in Fgura’s urban core, while the old farmhouse stood at the crossroads of the original medieval villages that made up Fgura, facing the 1790 church destroyed in 1955," FAA said in a statement.

Notarial archive documents dating to 1505 revealed that the name of Fgura derived from the ‘Ficura’ family that owned fields and farmhouses in this area, of which this is the only survivor, it added.

The old farmhouse itself incorporates a religious niche, for which the nearby alley is named, and several vernacular features.

For these reasons the PA refused attempts to have the building descheduled in 2009, 2011 and 2015. Yet without warning, in February 2019, the Environment Planning Review Tribunal granted a descheduling requested requested by Landscape Properties, the FAA said.

The association said that rather than new development, the fields adjoining the should become a park while the farmhouse itself could be converted to a civic centrenat.