A Chinese group just bought Spain's infamous billion-dollar 'ghost' airport for $10,000

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.

It just would have taken the right ruler...erm, leader... to make it happen and make it work.

You know, Robert Moses with a bigger heart or LBJ with a sense of morality. </s>

It cost the Chinese 10,800 dollars to buy that airport.

#1 The title is incorrect from the original version.
#2 If $800 is insignificant to you, please provide proof of it by remitting me this amount to BipolarBob at BR 549, Podunk, Ar.

As a Boy Scout (way back when, before social engineering hit) I was obligated to sit in on a town council meeting. During the couple hours of remarkable boredom, the council took up the question of the town selling its antique fire truck to the privately-held fire department. After 20 minutes of bickering (how much _do_ you sell an antique fire truck for when you weren’t looking to sell, the buyer is sentimental, and whatever it’s worth is either insufferably high or pointlessly low), they finally settled on a sale price of $1. The point I learned was that sometimes a thing is “sold” to make the transfer for the sake of transferring official, with no interest in actually making anything off the sale.

Comparable: some CEOs have a salary of $1. Yes, one dollar per year. Steve Jobs was a famous example, but not the only one.

An airport for $10,800? the whole thing, however bad shape it may be in? That’s not a sale price, that’s just giving it away. Really. A check was written just so the in-place bureaucracy had something to work with. “Here, take the airport for free ... just give me ten grand in Euros just so it looks like we actually sold it.”

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.