"White elephant" Castellon Airport in Spain welcomes first regular flight

It has been labeled a "white elephant" and would be considered to be a running joke were it not for the millions of euros it cost to build, but on Tuesday, Castellon Airport welcomed its first regular flight, just four and a half years after it was finished.

In those four years, Carlos Fabra, the former President of the Castellon Regional government has been sent to jail for corruption, while the EU is investigation whether the airport management company received an illegal public subsidy, but all of that was temporarily forgotten on Tuesday when a Ryanair flight landed in the morning, the first scheduled flight to arrive at the airport on the east coast of Spain.

Castellon Airport cost 150 million euros (around 170 million U.S. dollars) to build, 300,000 of which was for a seven meter high copper statue which stands close to the entrance hall.

It was inaugurated in March 2011, but didn't receive the licenses it needed to begin operations until December 2014, when two pensioners landed a helicopter there.

Those pioneers were followed by Villarreal football club, who flew from Castellon and rock group Blur, who used the airport for a charter flight taking them to a nearby rock festival.

Now Ryanair will operate five flights a week between Britain and Castellon airport, which is actually 36 km from the town of Castellon.

The first flight contained 189 passengers and received an official welcome from Ryanair officials and local dignitaries.

The passengers were a mix of holidaying Brits and locals, many of whom work or study in Britain and the airport management company has said it will be carrying out surveys to see the length of their stays and final destinations to help calculate the viability of the airport.

However, passengers should not get too accustomed to the new destination: of the five weekly flights, three are from London and two from Bristol and those from Bristol are only available until October. Endit