Posted on 07/20/2015 8:15:00 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Spain's "ghost airport" - that cost hundreds of millions of euros to build and which became a notorious symbol of the excess of the country's bonanza years has been sold to a group of British and Asian investors for just €10,000 ($10,835).
Ciudad Real airport airport, in the central Castilla-La Mancha region, has been closed since 2012, despite opening only four years prior to closure.
The regional authorities raised an estimated €1billion in private investment to build it. They had hoped it would draw millions of visitors each year to Ciudad Real and the surrounding area, which is known as the home of Miguel de Cervantes’s fictional knight Don Quixote.
But the airport itself soon became seen as a quixotic venture, drawing just 33,000 travelers in 2010.
The airport was previously made available at a price of €80 million, with that sale expiring on July 10 without any takers, allowing lower offers to be made.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
Let the airport “flipping” begin
I think it’s 10,000 euros not $.
The jetway to nowhere. China is well versed in “ghost” properties. they’ve built entire cities than no one lives in.
CC
RE: I think it’s 10,000 euros not $.
Yeah, but what’s a few hundred dollars? LOL.
What about Mirabel in Montreal? Or that one in the Illinois suburbs of St. Louis that was going to be a new hub for TWA?
10,000 euros, but how much did they have to pay in bribes to get that price?
I wonder if Spain will honor the sale or declare it void.
Considering what property taxes, regulatory compliance, et al will be on the property, that’s not a casual purchase. You don’t buy a property like that without a plan to do something with it; the buyer gets a complete airport in a hard-to-acquire location, and Spain gets a massive piece of dead real estate up & functioning again.
a dome over East St Louis....ahhhh, the imagination runs wild. just think of all of the municipalities that could use a dome for the rest of our sake:)
It’s a fixer upper for sure.
Smart buy.
You don’t see American companies doing much that’s smart anymore.
Profits and entrepreneurialism are punished, taxed, and targeted.
Mirabel did finally find a use—as a cargo airport. All the major cargo airlines now operate out of that airport. And Mirabel is the home to Bombardier Aerospace, who will assemble the CS100 and CS300 regional airliners at assembly plants located at the airport.
Top Gear did a show down there a few years ago.
It’s not just this airport that’s deserted. Square miles of multi-story appartment buildings as well. They were racing through ghost towns.
Cool. I know that the movie The Terminal was shot there, since it had a large terminal that was rarely used.
A perfect example of the views of Austrian Economics.
Keynesians would say “at least that money provided jobs, which meant wages to many workers in the area, which meant that there was a significant economic multiplier for other businesses.”
Austrians would say: No - fake interest rates, printed money and easy debt which distorted the market for this project actually makes it economically destructive. The debt which must be written off, the materials wasted, and the subsequent bust will be more destructive than the brief economic high created by the building of this useless airport.
Hmmmm. Didn’t Jeremy Clarkson and his two buddies use the runways in one of their shows a few seasons ago for some high speed car shenanigans?
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