Why buy a house when you can buy a whole airport for £7000

vivatifosi

Slightly facetious title, but interesting story from the Telegraph. Ciudad Real Airport was one of the white elephants built in the Spanish construction boom. Now a joint British-Chinese group may buy it and invest in it as a hub for Chinese flights to Europe.

It was originally touted as Madrid South airport, in spite of being 125 miles from the capital. It will be interesting to see how this pans out.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/transport/11747577/British-investors-buy-27m-Spanish-airport-for-just-7000.html

vivatifosi

Doing some more research into this, there are 20 airports in Spain, currently working under capacity or not accepting flights at all. Most were built in the boom years, when Spain spent 1.79% of its GDP on its infrastructure, 3 times that of Germany.

Video re a different abandoned airport in the Pyrenees:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZecpdpB_RE

Video about Ciudad Real Airport:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMMxMxb50to

Although Ciudad Real was privately financed, EU analysis shows that only half of EU funded airport infrastructure is being sufficiently used and that 38m euros of airport investment is not being used at all:

http://www.eca.europa.eu/Lists/ECADocuments/INSR14_21/INSR14_21_EN.pdf

ess0two

Ryanair were due to open routes into here this year?

vivatifosi

Ryanair it would appear have operated out of Ciudad Real in the past. I used to fly Ryanair to Strasbourg until they fell out over subsidies. If someone gives Ryanair a concession to fly into Ciudad Real, maybe they will again. It needs to be made worth their while though as it is not an obvious place to go to unless it is dirt cheap to get there.

Generali

Isn't Ciudad the airport that only received its first flight a few months ago ratger like the bridges to nowhere and so on built as pork for Governments to push stuff through?

antrobus

ess0two wrote: »

Ryanair were due to open routes into here this year?

That would be Castellon. Which is on the coast somewhere near Valencia I think.

purch

vivatifosi wrote: »

It was originally touted as Madrid South airport, in spite of being 125 miles from the capital.

Ryanair would consider that to be Madrid Central airport.

lostinrates

If we put aside national financial interest and think Europe wide would not these airports make good location for Europe hub/ stop overs rather than expansion of airports already near capacity? Doesn't seem a terrible idea.

One is minded to say north of England could benefit in the same way, but Spain seems better lasted for more of Europe at just a very short hop / skip/ jump.......and the stuff is there and Spain could benefit greatly.

vivatifosi

lostinrates wrote: »

If we put aside national financial interest and think Europe wide would not these airports make good location for Europe hub/ stop overs rather than expansion of airports already near capacity? Doesn't seem a terrible idea.

One is minded to say north of England could benefit in the same way, but Spain seems better lasted for more of Europe at just a very short hop / skip/ jump.......and the stuff is there and Spain could benefit greatly.

As part of the potential purchase syndicate is Chinese, I wonder if this will be developed as a hub to get Chinese goods into Europe. China is also planning to build an overland freight train route. It's ironic considering one of the reasons that it was built in the first place was to get Spanish perishables shipped more quickly.

Whatever happens, if the people of Ciudad Real have more job opportunities, hopefully that's a good thing.

antrobus

vivatifosi wrote: »

... China is also planning to build an overland freight train route. ....

Planning? It's been running since before Christmas.:) Goes from Yiwu (which is somewhere in China) to Madrid.

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/dec/10/silk-railway-freight-train-from-china-pulls-into-madrid

IronWolf

But I thought investment in infrastructure lead to economic prsoperity, isnt that what all these Keynesians have been telling us for a decade
?