The owners of Terra Mitica theme park have plans for expansion. The president of Aqualandia SL, Georges Santa-Maria has confirmed that the park has put in a request for two fold plan.
Firstly, to build three new hotels adjacent to the park which will offer over four thousand rooms with themed accommodation similar to that in PortAventura in Salou, a very popular resort about an hour south of Barcelona. Their aim is to make it a destination holiday, whereby once there you stay - like at Disney. Officials said that they still need to finalise the design and implementation of the project but would ideally like to lay the first foundation stone of the first hotel "before the end of the year"! Construction would take place in phases although no date has yet been set but the first hurdle would be to obtain permission for the change of use of the land.
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| Plenty of land surrounding the park |
Terra Natura, the wildlife park located next to Terra Mitica has already applied for permission to construct a "camp ground" with 200 log cabins in keeping with its nature and preservation ethos to attract visitors to the park. The main advantage which they have over Terra Mitica is that Terra Natura is open all year round - something which the theme park will have to think long and hard about in my opinion. There is a beautiful hotel literally across the way from Terra Mitica - Villaitana which I doubt ever gets packed to capacity as it is off the main track of Benidorm.
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| Luxurious Villaitana complex |
With so many hotels already in the resort Im not too sure about the viability of such an adventurous project and think that there are other ways of increasing visitor numbers to the park - introduce more rides and facilities for when the weather is not so good and most importantly as far as I am concerned - stay open all year round! Currently they are open "full time", by which I mean 7 days per week for only 3 months of the year and closed for virtually 5 months! EuroDisney in Paris do not shut and the weather there is similar, if not worse than we get here on the Costa Blanca.
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| This years discount |
Oh, and even more important, reduce the entrance prices instead of wasting money on printing discount vouchers - the entrance price is 29 euros for a day ticket which then gives you access to the park for free on the following day. Why not just bring the price down to 15 euros - you would increase footfall instantly. A family of 4 would currently pay over 100 euros to get in, which is a considerable amount of money and a carefully considered outing. If you halved that to 50 euros then most would think it reasonable and probably wouldn´t give it a second thought.
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| Indoor slope in Manchester |
The second project which Terra Mitica plan on is to construct an indoor ski slope with artificial snow - not a dry run but similar to "Chill Factores", the one in Manchester opposite the Trafford shopping centre with a slope measuring 1.5 km - the one in Manchester is only 180 metres long!
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| The real thing.... |
As far as I am aware there are none in Spain and this I think is a good idea... it would certainly be a novelty and somewhere to practice if planning on going skiing. There are a number of ski resorts within a few hours drive of Benidorm and it is a very popular activity here. It would certainly open up what is a niche market, however Antonio Mayor, president of the hoteliers association HOSBEC is not so keen on the idea but does support the building of a new hotel complex to compliment the theme park experience.
