Terra Mítica does not raise its head: the ugly duckling of Spanish parks

The year of discovery, the year that everything could, the year in which Spain began to be Spain, it was also the year in which Terra Mítica was conceived.. 1992. Although its birth would be left for the summer of 2000, it was in 1992 when the pines of Serra Cortina, in Benidorm, burned uncontrollably until they destroyed a vast area that included a premium package: the 10 million square meters that in 1996 served —expropriation through—to constitute the surface of Terra Mitica.

In the distance between the conspiracies and the assumptions, the Cortina fire remained in the imagination as the necessary cause for a consequence: the real estate use of a piece of land that required its absence, its non-existence.. On the ashes of the pines, the Phoenix Bird grew, the star attraction of Terra Mítica in its first bars.

“The works remain, the people leave,” writes, paraphrasing the divo of Zaplanismo, Julio Iglesias, the journalist Francesc Arabí in his book Ciudadano Zaplana (Ed.Akal). In his work, the best portrait of the former Valencian president, the Benidorm theme park is cited up to 38 times. It is not accidental because its genesis, its development and its fall explain in an almost parallel way the trajectory of the politician. “If there is an icon that concentrates all the perversions, irregularities and illegalities that have looted the Valencian Community, that is the Benidorm Terra Mítica leisure park,” writes Arabí, who circumscribes its construction to the “permanent bachelor party status” in which the community was installed in that cycle.

Mythology draws the Phoenix as the bird that regenerates from the ashes and, despite the fury of the flames, manages to be reborn.. Always a little more, always a new life. In a display of coherence with its own history, the flight of the Phoenix invited the first VIPs of Terra Mítica to climb to a height of 54 meters. And from there fall abruptly. A journey of 3 seconds, at 100 km/h. In the last two decades, the Phoenix has mainly served to embody the fall of the park in the headlines.

Zaplana himself could have fallen dragged by the acceleration of those glittering attractions. Accusations about money laundering and false invoices have flown over his head but, like the bird that escaped from his prison, he emerged unscathed from the fire.. It contributed to the grave, however, from the Valencian savings banks such as CAM and Bancaja. “The park that was going to transform a dry patch at the foot of the Serra Cortina into a gold mine, the complex in which 400 million euros of spending disguised as an investment were hung”, writes Arabí.

But far from steepening its flight, the mammoth dream of recreating Mediterranean civilizations in the heat of Benidorm has ended up as an ugly duckling in Spanish parks. If —beyond its own speculative meaning— the narrative of Terra Mítica aspired to look at Port Aventura from face to face, and perch itself as one of the most important leisure areas in the country, the balance after overcoming the pandemic is definitive.

Far from becoming a lever for the deseasonalization of tourism on the Costa Blanca, or boosting family tourism compared to the type of visitor profile in Benidorm outside of summer, the park has been reducing its opening calendar to a limit of just three months and medium, from the beginning of June to the middle of September. Two of its five areas —Iberia and Las Islas— only open in the months of July and August, de facto turning the park into a summer complement, far from its aspirations.

Its possible competitors, such as Port Aventura or Parque Warner, open from February to December. The income statement highlights the distances. If in 2021 Terra Mítica entered 4.3 million (with losses of six), Warner's income in the same year was 53 million (eight profit) and Port Aventura 163 (with fifteen profit)..

The attraction that, like a ferocious beast in an abandoned zoo, best expresses the drift of the park is The Rescue of Ulysses, one of the most cutting-edge attractions in Europe and that, with an investment of 18 million for its premiere, recreates Telemachus' journey in search of his father Ulysses. River boats, fifty animatronics and advanced technological development. For years, however, it has been unused after the animatronics stopped working and Ulises himself did not appear on the tour.. Your roller coaster is abandoned. The pufo and financial calamities ended up defeating mythology.