Ryanair to serve Spain’s ghost airport of Castellón

Spain’s Castellón airport gained notoriety as a symbol of the country’s credit-fuelled construction boom and bust.

Budget Irish carrier Ryanair has revealed this week that it is to begin operating a regular service between the UK and Castellón’s ‘Ghost airport’, which – since being completed in 2011 at a cost of €145 million – has yet to handle a single commercial flight.

Kenny Rogers, Ryanair’s Chief Marketing Officer, has said that the strong demand among Spanish emigrants who now work and reside in the UK – as well as the many thousands who hope to do so in the near future – prompted the airline to open up two routes: twice-weekly between Bristol, and three times a week from London Stansted…

“London is the number one destination for unemployed Spanish youth,” said Rogers in an interview with the Daily Telegraph. “There is a strong demand for a route from Castellón, which we will meet and will be the first commercial airline to fly there.”

The airport at Castellón has been beset by failure and scandal ever since the project began. Located midway between Barcelona and Valencia close to Spain’s northeastern Mediterranean coast, construction of the airport began towards the tail-end of the Spanish property boom, and was intended to service the anticipated hundreds of thousands of new property owners that were expected to purchase homes in the region.

Those homes, and those homebuyers, never materialised as Spain’s economy took a tumble in 2008. However, construction continued apace, and in 2011 the airport was finally finished… but nobody came.

To compound its folly further, the airport commissioned a prominent statue of local politician Carlos Fabra, who championed its construction. Fabra was jailed for four years in December for tax fraud.

Castellón airport has begun to spring to life in 2015, however. In January a charter flight carrying the Villareal football club’s players and staff used the airport to travel to an away match against San Sebastián in northern Spain, and Ryanair’s first flights are expected to arrive around Easter time.

As part of the Irish company’s change of tack, Ryanair has said that it will attempt to start servicing more major city airports rather than – as has been their previous business strategy – flying into lesser airports in order to save on tax costs and landing charges.

This pioneering attempt to bring Castellón into the Ryanair family is to be applauded, provided the company does not begin marketing the route as something that it most definitely is not, such as Valencia North…