Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (EFE).- The Loro Parque group is willing to go ahead with the Siam Park water park that it wants to build in the south of Gran Canaria, despite the obstacles it has encountered to carry it out, and estimates the investment required for the project that was presented in 2015 at around 160 million euros, when it was valued at 80 million euros.
The group’s president, Wolfgang Kiessling, and the vice-president, his son Christoph, presented this Wednesday to businessmen and journalists the project to be carried out in the El Veril area, next to Playa del Inglés, and which includes a hotel with 300 rooms, whose execution would employ more than 1,000 people and, once launched, would generate work for 600.
The legal adviser of Loro Parque, Jaime Rodríguez Cíe, who has also intervened in the presentation, has trusted in statements to journalists that it can be carried out after the demonstrations of support for the project recently expressed by PP and CC, the two parties who will govern the San Bartolomé de Tirajana City Council through a pact after the 28M elections.
According to Rodríguez Cíe, the Loro Park Group has invested in recent years, since it acquired the El Veril land, some 30 million euros, which in the words of Wolfgang Kiessling have been “for nothing”, in the eleven and a half years that they have been trying to carry out the park, a project that “will be difficult and complicated and it will not be safe if there are no agreements.”
The new Siam Park, which will complete the offer of the Sea Aquarium in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and the group’s theme parks in Tenerife (Loro Parque and Siam Park) could become the largest in Europe, with more than three million visitors a year, the legal adviser has indicated.
The project, which was unanimously declared in 2015 of island interest by the plenary session of the Cabildo de Gran Canaria, still does not have a building permit and is awaiting the drafting of the new Modernization, Improvement and Increased Competitiveness Plan in the field of El Veril, after the annulment of the first in 2022 by the Supreme Court.
In these years there have been more than 20 administrative disputes that the group has had to face, all of them resolved in their favor, except for the one mentioned by the Supreme Court, the legal adviser recalled.
The different obstacles that they have encountered and that they have managed to overcome have implied some modifications in the theme park projected to be “bigger and better” than the Siam Park in the south of Tenerife, as it is more modern and includes new attractions such as the called “The Tree of Life”, which will have slides up to 27 meters high.
The park will extend over one kilometer, next to the GC-1 motorway and the GC-500 road, and will recreate, like the one in the south of Tenerife, a Thai atmosphere that will encourage adventure in adults and children, because there will be recreational areas for both, explained Christoph Kiessling.
Its entrance will simulate that of access to the old kingdom of Thailand and will have a wave pool and beach, a floating market, luxury cabins to spend the day, a restaurant, a beach club, a children’s area with an appropriate wave pool, as well as a “mountain of adrenaline”, and all this surrounded by Thai buildings and exuberant vegetation, has detailed the vice president of the group. EFE