Statue of jailed politician marks entrance of Spain's Castellon 'ghost airport'
The strange saga of Spain's "ghost airport" at Castellon continues.
You may remember Castellon as the billion-Euro airport near Valencia that opened in 2011, with great fanfare, but no passengers, no planes and, seemingly, no future. We've written about it several times here, most recently which it appeared to have good news—the arrival of Ryanair, with five flights a week to two UK destinations.
That appeared to put an end to demands to sell the white-elephant field for industrial development or housing or other purposes, and seemed to take some of the attention away from the way it was built and the fact that the leading politician in the push to get it built is in jail for tax fraud.
Now, however, it turns out that Ryanair is being paid €600,000 a year—about €10 per passenger—to operate the service for the guaranteed 60,000 seats a year. The money is coming from Canada-based SNC-Lavalin, which was paid €6 million to take over the airport. SNC-Lavalin was also given €25 million to spend on development over the next 10 years; some of that is the money being paid to Ryanair.
Oh, and SNC-Lavalin doesn't have to pay the regional government anything until the airport hits 1.2 million passengers a year...which is likely to happen by the Twelfth of Never. For much more detail, see TheLocal.es by clicking HERE
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