• A 60 hectare theme park, multi-day Mars Experience and a Space Camp
• Two hotels and an international convention center
• Tourist condos, and wellness center
• Restaurants and retail

SpacePortGranScala will include two space-themed [Year2100 and Year3000] casinos each on a 9 hectare site, and each with a hotel and mini cultural museum.

The underlying core offer of SpacePortGranScala will be “Explore”, “Experience”, “Innovate” and “Live”, themes that will be carried throughout SpacePortGranScala’s theme park, hotels, retail, and lifestyle real estate.

Using space as a theme together with our human desire to explore, and with technology as the enabler, SpacePortLeisure will provide intelligent, stimulating, and fun-filled lifestyle, entertainment and learning experiences that will give freedom to transcend language and culture, thus creating dynamic new ways of learning and of building new communities across the globe. Our creativity will be as expansive as the Universe.

Only a privileged few will be able to experience a real flight into space. In conceiving the SpacePortLeisure concept, the goal is to give visitors and residents alike, an experience of “Stepping into Space” at our SpacePortGranScala. (more…)

Aquantica will be developing the Gran Escala water amusement park. Although I could find a lot of information about this park to be build, I could not find anything about the company behind it.

Novomatic Holding is an integrated global gaming company and producer of high tech gaming equipment. Their main office is located in Austria.

SpacePortLeisure, a South African company headquartered in Cape Town, develops world-class “next generation” space, science and technology theme parks, hotels, and mixed used lifestyle urban city destinations, which provide a “space tourism experience” on Planet Earth for those unable to travel into space. The evolving global business, with a focus on China and Western Europe, where it is building significant footprints, spans these lines of businesses.

The Spyland concept, as will be seen in the Gran Scala project in Zaragoza, started in 1996 as an interactive museum. In 2001, it turned into an amusement park. During the years it developed into a more elaborated project, as it included educational, as well as entertaining factors starting around mid 2004.

Since the conception of this project, the idea which has been the central theme of this project was the creation of “a destination city of leisure for all ages”. It will consist of 32 hotel-casinos, five (5) major theme parks, a conference center, several other hotels, hundreds of retail shops, restaurants, a golf course, a horse race track, an opera, museums, and residential development. Gran Scala is a grand scale project of International Leisure Development (ILD).

This project will be located in Spain and more precisely in the desert of Los Monegros, an hour away by car from Zaragoza, the capital of the autonomous region of Aragon. Aragon occupies a strategic place in Europe in-between 2 zones of high economic development: the Atlantic and the Mediterranean regions. Aragon is a central place of communication that is constantly being renewed due to the intensification of the exchanges in the country. Situated half way between Madrid and Barcelona, Zaragoza is the 6th largest city in Spain. (more…)

Expo 2008 is a planned international exposition to be held from 14th June to 14th September 2008 and coordinated by the Bureau of International Expositions organization which is responsible for sanctioning World’s Fairs.The 2008 expo will be held in Zaragoza, Spain, with the topic of “Water and sustainable development“. The event is being placed in a meander of the river Ebro.

Zaragoza, host city for the International Exposition, is the administrative and financial capital of the autonomous community of Aragon and the fifth largest Spanish city in inhabitants (660,000), behind Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Seville. Zaragoza was elected the host city of Expo 2008 on December 16, 2004 by the BIE, beating Thessaloniki (Greece) and Trieste (Italy).

The exhibition’s most emblematic buildings will be the Water Tower, a 80-metre-high transparent building designed by Enrique de Teresa to evoke a drop of water, Zaha Hadid’s Bridge Pavilion and the river aquarium. The exposition site will also host several espectacles, including a daily parade by Cirque du Soleil called The Awakening of the Serpent.

Aside from the countries, non-government organizations and private companies will be taking part in Expo 2008, always with the idea of water and sustainable development. The Expo 2008 host committee has estimated that this event could generate 135 million euros in receipts for admission to the exhibition centre.

Source: WikiPedia
URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expo_2008

The casino “city”, to be built on 5,000 acres over the next decade in eastern Spain, will include 32 hotels, five theme parks and, in a Las Vegas touch, may even feature “wedding chapels” to encourage honeymoon tourism. Plans also include a stadium and a conference centre. This being Spain, a bullring is envisaged, too.

One of the theme parks is to be called Spyland, where the world of James Bond will be the dominant motif. Backers plan to invite Daniel Craig and Eva Green, stars of Casino Royale, the latest Bond film, to bring a touch of glamour to the project.

“We intend to approach the owners of the Bond movies to see if we can use James Bond in Spyland,” said Didier Rancher, a French entrepreneur whose company is part of the consortium. He and others involved in it hoped that the development would become the largest casino resort in Europe, with at least 12m visitors a year.

For the moment the name of the casino city is simply Gran Escala, meaning large-scale.

The project will be formally unveiled next month. It sounds extraordinarily ambitious, to say the least: the casinos will cover the sweep of history, featuring cavemen croupiers, Roman centurions or courtiers from the time of France’s Louis XIV – not to mention agents of the KGB. (more…)