From star project to star project. While the real estate bubble in Spain was still growing like a huge and well-fed snowball, an idea arose in the Pallars Jussà region of the province of Lérida, which for a while made this region of Northern Catalonia dream of becoming one of the largest. European ski capital. The idea was, of course, promising. What the project creators planned was to create a complex with very long ski slopes, ski lifts, golf courses, hotels, residential areas… With an investment of millions of euros, tens of kilometers of slopes and hundreds of apartments, all in XXL format.

Just because it is ambitious does not mean that the project is unattainable. The rowing started. Diggers began to remove the soil, and workers began to build walls and hammer in posts. Today, among all this, there are bones of steel and concrete, infrastructures that have been obsolete for decades and whose current managers cannot get rid of even for a very affordable price.

They tried this again and again, at a price almost seven times lower than their first attempt. And not even then. Today no one seems to be interested in the remains of Vallfosca-Interllacs, which in its time was one of the most ambitious projects in the industry.

Click on the image to go to the tweet.

Valfosca, the ski capital. It sounds ambitious, but that was one of the ideas behind the Vallfosca-Interllacs megaproject. In the 90s, its supporters wanted to create a huge resort at La Torre de Capdella in Espui, with 13 slopes with a total length of 40 km, nine ski lifts and an infrastructure that could provide artificial snow. There was even talk of connecting it to Boí Taüll and creating a large area with dozens of kilometers of slopes for skiing. Goal: To be at least one of the biggest references in Southern Europe.

Ski and non-ski. It wasn’t all about space to practice with sticks, skis or boards. snow. This idea had been around since the early 80s, and when it was finally adopted in the late 90s, it was meant to be implemented in a big way, without half-measures. The complex included a residential area with 900 houses, a golf course and four hotels. Country He notes that the project will have such a large cost that it will be worth the time, with a distribution of hundreds and hundreds of millions of euros. Those were good times. From brick. And especially the real estate boom.

The project was presented in 1998 after the city council and the company Vallfosac Interllacs SA agreed on the promotion of the huge profitable facility. Although the project seemed huge at the time, the truth was that for a while the work on the last branches of the brick bubble appeared to be progressing at a good pace. In 2000, the development license for the 20-hectare area was obtained and in 2001, work on the site progressed at a good pace.

So much so that Lugares de Nieve recalls that only a few years later, at the end of 2003, the Vallfosca Mountain Resort was introduced in Barcelona and La Torre de Capdella itself; It is an ambitious project that the supporters of this project want to realize. We are ready for the 2006-2007 ski season in the short term.

Click on the image to go to the tweet.

Click on the image to go to the tweet.

A snowy candy. In this optimistic atmosphere, employment creation, public housing, support for the region, million-dollar investments and the potential of the complex were discussed. In 2005, the real estate company Fadesa entered the project strongly with an investment of 230 million euros, and just two years later the Galician firm merged with the powerful Martinsa.

If there is a date that can be marked in red in the Vallfosca chronicle, it is July 2008, when the Martinsa-Fadesa board of directors decided to file for voluntary bankruptcy. Its huge debt of 7.156 million covered almost all its assets. Including those grown from Valfosca-Interllacs.

More than promised. This was the final blow to the ambitious project to transform the Pallars Jussà region into the great ski capital of Southern Europe. The problem (or not) was that the ambitious venture was about more than plans, infographics, promises, and the many dreams that have been brewing since the ’80s.

The infrastructure was built on the ground: ski lift poles, pine trees, a golf course, pipes for artificial snowballs, half-finished apartments… Country He recently echoed statements made by the mayor of La Torre de Capdella, who estimated that the money “buried” in the remote mountains of northern Catalonia was more than 15 million euros. And not only that.

The project’s organizers even handed over several dozen apartments, whose values ​​have since fallen. “There are people who paid 270,000 euros for a two-bedroom apartment and sold it for 80,000 euros,” adds a local resident who was working in apartments at the time.

Attempts to revive. This being the case, and given the importance of the project, there have been attempts to save at least part of Vallfosca-Interllacs. The Generalitat began looking for new investors and various possibilities for completing the pending work were discussed. The project and the mountain sports potential of the region still make headlines from time to time. Other chronicles focus on the desolate appearance their facilities present today, with their half-finished walls and ironworks abandoned for years in the middle of the mountain.

Not even affordable. The situation today is so different from twenty years ago that investors seem to want nothing left of Vallfosca Interllacs. It’s not even a gift. And the price offered goes down and down and has little to do with the figures being asked at the time. If the insolvency administrator demanded 2.3 million for the plots in 2018 – Nevasport states that this is land in the residential area – the reality today is that in February 2024 they appear to be well below their value. Half a dozen offers to attract interested investors were made without the slightest success.

The last one was just as unsuccessful and was released for 352,500 euros, almost seven times less than the asking price at the time, a far cry from the million-dollar investments announced in 2001 to create a great mountain icon. Sports. The fact that the Generalitat rated parts of the project as “unsustainable” in 2020 or the reclassification of certain land on which the houses will be built as rural did not contribute to the attractiveness of the land either.

With no plans to change this situation for now, Vallfosca seems doomed to continue being a giant ghost ski resort. It’s a reminder of what could have been and what might be left in this venture amid the debris of the real estate bubble.

Image | Vall Fosca-Town Hall La Torre de Capdella

via | Country

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