I reach Castellón, a somewhat sleepy coastal city on the Mediterranean, with a nice park and a phenomenally ugly department store.
As a child, I liked Castellón, the last place where we stopped to get gas before reaching our village. I’m here because I want to know why Castellón built an airport from which no aircraft has ever taken off, an airport that cost €150 million in a city that’s only 65 kilometers from Valencia, which already has an airport that’s much too big for the region.
I leave the Autopista del Mediterráneo and drive along the CV-10 toward the Castellón airport. The CV-10 is the best highway I’ve ever driven on. The asphalt is perfect, the signs are new, and there is grass in the median. After about half an hour, I’m standing in front of a fence arguing with a security guard. The man reaches for his radio and says: “Serra 1 to Serra 2, we have a code 3!”
You can trigger a code 3 by asking a guard at the fence whether you can take a look at the airport from up close, an airport that was built with taxpayer money and was officially opened on March 25, 2011.
I get out of the car. Behind me is a large sculpture standing at the access road to the airport. A good friend of a local politician is still working on the piece, which is unbelievably ugly and reportedly cost €300,000. The guard talks into his radio. From where I’m standing, I can see the tower, some of the 3,000 parking spaces and a portion of the 2,700-meter (8,856-foot) runway.
“I gave your license plate number to the police,” says the guard. I nod and think to myself that the Castellón airport isn’t even the most pointless — and certainly not the most costly — airport in Spain. An airport was built in Ciudad Real, 160 kilometers from Madrid, at a cost of €1 billion. It now serves small private aircraft.
For years, Castellón suffered from the fact that it wasn’t as important, rich or well-known as Valencia and Alicante, the other two major cities in the region. Someone hit upon the idea of changing that by building 17 golf courses. Seventeen 18-hole golf courses translate into a lot of golfers, hence the airport. The golf courses never materialized.
The city behaved like a microcosm of Spain as a whole. Spain didn’t want to be Europe’s little brother. It wanted real airports and real highways. The days were gone when people like my father would arrive at a German train station in jackets too thin for the climate. The new Spain could play football, and it had companies like global telecommunications giant Telefónica and world-famous chefs like Ferran Adrià.
I leave the guard standing where he is and return to the highway. I’ll be in my parents’ village in three hours. A small detour takes me past a large construction site on which the Spanish railroad system is building another high-speed line. The country has more high-speed rail lines than Germany or France.
I ask myself what it must have been like to be a politician in the boom years, a period of senseless intoxication and time without measure. To be re-elected, many politicians had to have something to show for themselves, a project, and preferably one built of stone and concrete. Playing fields, theaters, swimming pools and streetcars were popping up everywhere. The economy had gone mad, and so had politicians. But the democracy was fully functional. Spaniards could have asked where all the money was coming from, and why roads were improving and trains were getting faster, while their children were doing worse in school. They could have elected different politicians, more level-headed ones. I firmly believe that every village, every town and every province got exactly the politician it deserved.
This extract is taken from an article “A Visit To Absurdistan: What Happened to the Spain Where I Was Born?” by Juan Moreno published in Der Speigel. The full article can be seen here:-
Another day in paradise 