Property owners, investors and estate agents in the Navarra region of northern Spain are excited by the prospect of the world’s biggest leisure park being built on their doorstep.

The €17billion project, being built by a London-based consortium, will be called Gran Scala and will feature five theme parks, 32 hotels, casinos, golf courses, a conference centre, hundreds of shops, a race track, opera house, museums, a bullring and residential development.

It will create 60,000 jobs - and send property prices rocketing. The project, which will dwarf Disneyland Paris, will channel billions of pounds into the sun-drenched Aragon Valley, south of the Pyrenees.

Attractions will include a James Bond-style Spyworld, and backers plan to invite Daniel Craig and Eva Green, stars of the latest Bond film, Casino Royale, to add a touch of celebrity glamour to the venture.
It will open up the Los Monegros desert, a hostile undeveloped terrain unsuitable for many kinds of development but perfect for this type of self-contained tourist project.

The site is close to the airport in Zaragoza, Spain’s sixth largest city, which will also soon be home to a high-speed rail link to Madrid. And it will be ideally sited between Spain’s three biggest cities, Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia.

The project is the brainchild of International Leisure Development (ILD), a consortium comprising 12 companies from Britain, America, Australia and France. A spokesman for ILD says: “We want to create a mixture of Las Vegas and Orlando. Spain is a country with 60 million tourists and then there’s the local population plus the people who would travel to Aragon purely for Gran Scala.”
It is estimated that 25 million visitors a year would be drawn to the area.

A major objective of the project is to promote the region while upholding and respecting the highest standard of environment awareness. ILD has made a strong commitment to respect concerns for the balance between the environment and tourism and promises that the infrastructures will be mainly supplied though solar and wind energy.

At the moment, typical Navarra property prices start at about £152,000 for a two-bedroom modern apartment in Pamplona, with a spacious modern three-bedroom house 23miles away in Olite for £183,000.

A new-build three-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment in Zaragoza can be purchased for £128,000. But property experts are all predicting that these prices will be heading skywards as the Gran Scala turns from developer’s dream into reality.

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