Draw closer and there's something eerie about Ciudad Real's Central
Airport. There's hardly a plane in sight. Nobody's around. Cars can
only be heard faintly in the distance.
This is one of Spain's "ghost airports" -- huge projects often funded
by taxpayer money that helped drive Spain's economic boom and now
symbolize the wasteful spending that contributed to its spectacular
bust.
Envisioned three years ago as a satellite airport for congested
Madrid, Central boasts one of Europe's longest runways, yet there's
hardly a skid-mark from the handful of weekly flights it now
handles. Its vast and airy terminal, designed to handle 2.5 million
passengers a year, echoes every sound.
Spain's downturn has played its role in Central's woes, but critics
say it was never a viable airport from the beginning -- a pork-barrel
project too far from the capital to serve any real purpose.
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With Spain struggling to emerge from an economic downturn that has
saddled it with a euro-zone high unemployment rate of 21 percent,
principally due to the collapse of its oversized construction
sector, Central stands as a cautionary tale for a Spain adjusting to
leaner times.
But signs abound that Spain has not fully learned the lessons of its
profligate spending. Spain recently announced a high-speed rail link
to the sparsely populated northwest region of Galicia, a plan many
economists see as an extravagance. Bridge and highway projects are
plowing forward in the face of criticism that Spain just can't
afford them.
"We had great hopes for Central, we believed in it, dreamt about it,
we thought it was going to be the region's salvation," said Ciudad
Real taxi driver Enrique Buendia, who can hardly remember the last
time he got a run to the airport.
"But, when you mix politicians and business it's bad news."
Indeed, it's an unhealthy mix of politics and business that critics
blame for white elephants such as the airport in Ciudad Real, a city
of 74,000 people. Spain has a history of pouring public money into
dodgy projects to fuel the careers of ambitious politicians and
local entrepreneurs.
The airports and other projects illustrate how regional governments
and government-linked savings banks drove themselves into a debt
swamp from which it will take years to emerge.
Analysts see regional government debt as being one of the main drags
on Spain's bid to slash its deficit from 11.2 percent of GDP in 2009
to within the European Union limit of 3 percent by 2013.
Central is busy compared to two-year-old Huesca airport in northern
Spain, whose 30 employees won't see a commercial flight for some six
months. Its restaurant is busy, but with local people and because it
serves good meals.
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Then there's Castellon on the airport-abundant eastern coast.
Costing some euro150 million, it opened in March and hasn't yet seen
a plane. It most likely won't for a while as the national airport
authority ponders whether to grant it a license.
Castellon was built on the promise of future theme parks that have
yet to materialize, making its future look bleak.
At its entrance there is to be a 24-meter (79 foot) statue to Carlos
Fabra, the provincial president of Castellon who commissioned the
project, and has been investigated several times for corruption.
"We have substituted our obsession with bricks and house building
with an obsession for highways, high speed trains and airports, but
it's the same rubbish," said Fernando Fernandez, a macroeconomics
Professor at IE Business School in Madrid.
"It's like a drug addict trying detox," he said. "The economy has
been growing through construction for the last 10 years and that
creates all sorts of bad habits."
Leon, Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's
hometown, has turned a military airport into a commercial one but it
has only a handful of flights a week.
The city of 200,000 inhabitants is already reachable by a modern
highway and now is promised a high-speed rail stop as part of the
new bullet-train to Galicia. Meanwhile, southern Murcia has just built a second airport, half an
hour away from its perfectly good old one. Now there's talk of
Toledo, an hour away from Ciudad Real, building its own, too.
[to top of second column] |
![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2011/Jun/22/images/ads/current/mks_lda051210.png) Much of the problem stems from Spain's territorial makeup of 17
semiautonomous regions.
"This is a country of fiefdoms, like the Middle Ages, you know 'I
want my airport ... my convention center and my high-speed train,'"
said Stephen Matlin, managing director of the Matlin Associates
investment banking firm in Madrid.
"One or two airports is not the problem. It's when you take the
hundreds of thousands of projects, a billion dollars here, a billion
dollars there, pretty soon you're talking about a lot of money."
Central, about 235 kilometers (150 miles) south of Madrid, was
heavily funded by the regionally-controlled Caja Castilla La Mancha
savings bank that ended up being the first of Spain's troubled
savings banks to be bailed out by Spain's Central Bank last year. The airport, which cost some euro1.1 billion, was to have a
bullet-train stop to whisk people to Madrid but money and passengers
ran dry.
Critics say at that distance from Madrid, the rail link would never
have worked anyway. Madrid, meanwhile, resolved its congestion by
building a swanky new terminal. Now in receivership, Central's
looking for a buyer.
At the cafeteria, a handful of the airport's 90 employees staff have
coffee. A cleaner polishes the floor over and over. Panels flash
flights to and from New York, Stockholm and other distant locations,
but it's only because the technicians are checking that they work
properly.
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"The airport was a total rip-off," said Eva Acosta, 38, a publicity
agency employee. "Ciudad Real is too small for what they built. It
was a get-rich-quick scam between the politicians and the business
set."
Spain's two main political parties defend public infrastructure
projects and blame each other for the excesses. Rafael Simancas, the governing Socialist Party's spokesman for
infrastructure, argues that Spain for the last 20 years has
dedicated more on infrastructure than most of its wealthy neighbors
purely because it was coming from so far behind after the Franco
dictatorship that ended in 1978.
He said the government has trimmed public work spending by 40
percent because of the crisis but that Spain would continue to put
emphasis on infrastructure because it improves competitiveness.
Andres Ayala, his counterpart for the conservative opposition
Popular Party, tipped to form government after elections next year,
says the problem lies with financing, and that with more private
investment there would be fewer problems.
Both argue that when most of the questionable projects were drawn up
nobody could have foreseen the magnitude of the crisis to come.
But analysts say that unless Spain learns fast and begins investing
in a new economic model by pouring billions into education and
research and development, it could be headed for disaster.
"What we're doing is maintaining the old economic structure of the
country," said Fernandez. "Instead of investing in new skills for
people ... we spend money on keeping them busy to give the
appearance of bring the unemployment figures down."
[Associated
Press; By CIARAN GILES]
Associated Press writer Harold Heckle contributed to this story from
Madrid.
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This
material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or
redistributed.
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