Spain and Portugal for Visitors

Posted by : John Ross on Dec 13, 2007 - 12:08 PM Ecology

"Satire is dead," said the great Tom Lehrer when Kissinger was given the Nobel Peace Prize, and as if to confirm this, ILD spokespeople say that the monstruous leisure complex to be developed in the Monegros area of Spain will "take the baton from Expo Zaragoza," which will be held next year (2008) and will be dedicated to the theme of Water. The Government of Aragon and the investment consortium ILD have signed a preliminary agreement of cooperation whereby the former undertakes to provide all the necessary infrastructures for the megacomplex - electricity, gas, roads, health centres, schools, and water, especially water: water to build it, water to make it work, water for the millions of visitors and water for the tens of thousands of new permanent residents needed to run Gran Scala. And, it seems, no-one has even noticed the irony. Read more.

The numbers being thrown around are dizzying, for Gran Scala is intended to be second only to Las Vegas in scale. It will occupy nearly 8 square miles and have "32 hotel-casinos, five (5) major theme parks, a conference center, several (around 40) other hotels, hundreds of retail shops, restaurants, a golf course, a horse race track, an opera, museums, and residential development," says ILD's website (all the Spanish media reporting the story mention a bull-ring as well). The theme parks will be historical, and the casinos and many of the hotels will be themed in correspondence. Gran Scala is supposed to be going to attract 25 million visitors a year (one of the more difficult claims to swallow, being more than a third of what the whole of Spain draws at the moment) and create 60,000 jobs. Apart from the infrastructure, its estimated cost - I hope you are sitting down - is 17,000 million euros. El País points out that that is "over twice what the 1992 Barcelona Olympics cost, five times the budget of the Ministry of the Environment for 2007, three times what the new Madrid-Barajas Airport's Terminal 4 cost." I have done some calculations of my own - 17,000 million euros is very nearly the combined gross domestic product of Ghana and Tanzania. It is more than the gross state product of Vermont. It is over twenty times the annual cost of AIDS vaccine research. For heaven's sake, it is more than the GDP of Kenya.

Most of the few locals of Los Monegros are delighted with the idea, even euphoric. This is understandable, for the Monegros is a poor region, a sparsely populated county of semi-desert steppes straddling the provinces of Zaragoza and Huesca, and its thinly spaced inhabitants think their ship has finally come in. Almost as comprehensible is the self-satisfaction of Aragonese regional politicians, who have put aside party political differences to embrace the ILD's grandiose scheme, for all politicians know that investment is the easiest way to keep the electorate happy. The only political opposition has come from left-wing Izquierda Unida, with the support of ecological groups. For the landscape, ecology and flora and fauna of Los Monegros are unique.

While the optimism of Gran Scala's supporters is understandable, I must point out that neither casinos nor theme parks have ever done particularly well in Spain. True, as ILD points out, Spaniards do have a kind of gambling custom - few bars here lack the two fruit machines the law allows them, and lotteries of one sort or another are among the biggest in the world. But Spaniards do not think of either of these activities as gambling. In their own eyes, they are simply spending time in the bar, or buying lottery tickets to share between family, friends and workmates - if you don't do it, you feel left out. Casinos are a whole different ballgame, and Spanish ones are almost always full of foreigners, not natives.

And the history of theme parks in Spain is motley, and public authorities have more than once come out of this kind of scheme with egg on their faces. The first, PortAventura near Salou, inaugurated in 1995, is now more or less a financial success story, though successive rescues have been required for it to get there. Terra Mítica, opened in 2000, near Benidorm, has had a worse time of things, needing to go into suspension of payments in 2004 and not achieving an operating profit until 2006. Parque Warner (2002) near Madrid has been a serious embarrassment to the regional government, originally and still the major shareholder. Although the park is now making a profit, the Community of Madrid has lost heavily (the winner has been the American company which operated Parque Warner until recently) and has been trying to sell out as discretely as it can, and large-scale land requalifications (changing the legal use of the terrain to allow, for example, housing to be built) have been going on. Again in Madrid, Xanadú, intended to be an innovative leisure complex, was reduced before its inauguration by its American backers to little more than a huge shopping centre with an indoor ski slope attached.

Of course, the sheer scale of Gran Scala puts it in another dimension altogether. I do not necessarily wish it anything other than well, but there are a lot of but's.

Elsewhere on the Net:
El Gobierno aragonés se encargará de las infraestructuras y los servicios de Gran Scala, from El Periódico de Aragón
International Leisure Development PLC, the consortium.
Gran Scala, the project, as described by architects Art & Build and Nicolas Devuyst in a press release.
Aristocrat Technologies, ILD's biggest player, a giant in the gambling industry.