By Pascale Harter

The airport with no planes and other futile projects that have drained Spanish coffers

'Spain is different.' Ernest Hemingway said it first and in the 1980s the national tourist board used it as an advertising slogan. Now young Spaniards -- enduring 40 per cent unemployment -- say it with a bitter smile.

Foreigners might think that Spain is in financial meltdown because it is like Greece where, famously, few people pay their taxes. But Spain is different. In Spain, it's what taxes have been spent on that is the problem.

When Bilbao rebranded itself with a spectacular Guggenheim Museum, it set off a race to build grand projects. Now the country is littered with white elephants.

The semi-autonomous region of Valencia spent an estimated €1.1 billion on a futuristic 'science city' designed by the architect Santiago Calatrava. A science and culture centre in Alcorcon, on the outskirts of Madrid, lies half finished, having cost more than €600 million. In Santiago de Compostela, a 'City of Culture' is only half built but already four times over budget at €400 million. The Oscar Niemeyer International Cultural Centre in Aviles stopped organising events less than a year after it was inaugurated.

A new airport in Castellon opened in 2011 -- and promptly closed without a single commercial flight ever landing.

'We had an attack of wealth. We didn't know how, but suddenly we were rich,' says Miguel angel Bastenier, a columnist at the left-of-centre daily El Pais. 'There was such a frenzy for investing money, and people got inebriated.'

The airport in Castilla-La Mancha, named after Don Quixote, as this is where the deluded knight began tilting at windmills, is a private sector project but it provides a glaring example of how funds were wasted. Built 120 miles south of Madrid, it was supposed ensure the future of Ciudad Real, a town of 74,000 set in a baking, near deserted plain, according to the Socialists. It opened in 2008 and closed in 2011. For the past year barely a plane a week has touched down there. Not only did the Socialists in regional government at the time expropriate land to build the airport on, they also paid airlines to fly there, in effect subsidizing a private venture with taxpayers' money.

Politicians from both main parties also sat on the board of the local savings bank, the Caja Castilla-La Mancha. With a rumoured 70 per cent stake in direct and indirect investment in the airport, Caja Castilla-La Mancha became the first of Spain's local savings banks to go under. Two politicians have been sanctioned but there is still a shortage of answers.

Politicians say the airport in Castilla-La Mancha failed because it opened just as the global recession hit. But Carlos Otto, a journalist, sees it differently. 'I am convinced that the shareholders never thought it would work. The only profit in this airport was the building of it,' he says.

Indeed, the official bankruptcy report for the airport says: 'No thought was given to the investment needed to make the airport function as a business. The construction itself of the airport provided the first profit for the investors because they signed contracts with their own construction companies.'

The Spanish freedom of information campaign group, Civio, believes that the airport of Ciudad Real is typical and that the lack of accountability has to be addressed if Spain is to come out of its economic crisis.

Juan Jose Toribio, a right-wing economist at Spain's IESE business school, believes that to tackle Spain's uncontrolled spending you first have to tackle the country's sacred cows -- the semi-autonomous regions. 'Regional governments can spend money and inaugurate public works, but they don't run the political risk or cost of raising taxes,' he says. 'Perhaps we should return to a much more centralized system.'

The centre-right Popular Party of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy is keen to use the economic crisis to claw back powers from the regions. But that promises to be tough struggle which could end up tearing Spain apart.

Pascale Harter is a BBC correspondent in Spain

 

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