Rob Horgan
AVIATION authorities have scuppered plans from a brand new shopping centre in Malaga.
Plans for a multi-million euro designer outlet at Malaga’s Plaza Mayor have taken a ‘serious knockback’ after airport officials expressed concern about the impact it would have on planes landing and taking off. The British firm behind the plans, McArthurGlen, are now ‘desperately’ trying to work with the Civil Aviation board in order to get things back on track. “We are hopeful that this is just a glitch and can be resolved,” a spokesman said. “We need to have permission from the airport before we can go any further so we will be working with them to sort out the issue.” He added: “At the moment, we are still working towards a completion date of mid-2017.” Town Hall officials must now carry out new analysis of the site, following airport concerns over interference with radio transmission. The designer outlet – McArthurGlen’s first in Spain – is to include 90 stores across 17,000 square metres of retail space. It is estimated to cost €115 million in total.
If you want to go plane spotting, Plaza Mayor is the place to go. The planes are so close you can see the passengers through the windows. If you want a quiet day out however, it may not be the best place to visit lol.
Someone needs to get their finger out and make this happen. Inward investment, new jobs and more facilities is exactly what Spain needs right now for a sustained recovery. How about a new shopping centre in Velez Malaga?
Tram to Malaga would be good. The new shopping centre in Velez would be weldome too; El Ingenio is full of low quality tat shops.
This should come as no surprise as you can NEVER build anything very high near an airport for obvious reasons. The owners and planners should have known better before they even started wastimg time and effort on such a stupid idea. Move the whole thing somewhere else but it doesn’t belong next to a busy airport.
I don’t think height would be an issue. The plan as I understood it was to build a lager replica of Manchester’s Trafford Centre. There are 10-15 storey hotels around many airports already so a 3 storey shopping centre is hardly that high. I think the logistics might be the problem. Increasing the use of the airport roads could well mean gridlock at some times of the day. It is also an area of much activity in connection with the railway and docks. For that reason it probably needs to go to the other side of Malaga.