Airport to Nowhere: Spain’s Costly No-Fly Zone
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While having some of the wobbliest finances in Europe, here’s how a Spanish county built an airport nobody — except one lucky politician — wanted.
Six hundred thousand dollars is a lot to spend for eight ferrets. Administrators at Spain’s Castellón Airport announced the establishment of the ferret contract late last year. The job had been awarded to an animal handler, to control birds and rabbits that might endanger aircraft. The contract will pay the ferret wrangler 450,000 euros, or a little over $600,000. The money buys the weasels, plus a team of falcons, that will work six hours a day.
The contract was to start as soon as planes start landing at the airport, which its operators predicted, at the time, would happen this April. In December, the airport’s operators announced the ferrets would be showing up early, in January, to control a plague of rabbits that could “bite cables.” The ferrets will have three months to clear the area before the opening, which, if it happens, would finally come after 15 years of planning and delays.
It’s a big if. By December, officials in Castellón, a region of orange groves and long beaches near the city of Valencia on Spain’s Mediterranean coast, had not yet received permission from Spain’s central government in Madrid to take off and land large passenger jets in the area. And the airport’s director had made a public appeal to the local government for more funds — to offer incentives to airlines. Because, four months before opening day, not one airline had signed a deal to operate flights to Castellón.
Just a few months before the scheduled start of operations, and more than a decade after the plan’s conception, few in the little region of Castellón had demonstrated interest in having a local airport.
Who had? Ask that in Castellón, and one name comes up: a local politician named Carlos Fabra. Fabra, 66, is the latest patriarch in a line going back centuries in Castellón. A leader of the local Populist Party — the same center-right party that won Spain’s national elections in November — he had first assumed leadership of the local legislature in 1995. It was a position his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and various uncles had held on and off since the 19th century. Fabra soon announced a legacy project: an airport for Castellón.