The City of the Environment.
Garray, Soria, Castilla y León.
In order to prevent the project from being appealed by environmentalists, the regional government passed a special law to approve the construction of The City of the Environment. With sustainability as its leitmotif, the project comprised a technology park for 100 companies in the environmental sector, an industrial park focused on environmentally friendly activities, a convention center for 30,000 visitors/year, a hotel, a sports center, an archaeological site, a public river park, and 780 sustainable houses. In the parking lot, each of the 709 parking spaces would be equipped with charging points for electric vehicles (while in 2012, in the whole of Spain, only 484 electric cars were sold). When the works were stopped in 2013 due to financing problems, 52 million euros of public money had already been spent here. Its future has been compromised even more after the Spanish Constitutional Court ruled unconstitutional the law by which it was approved. In 2014, a court ruling stated that the complex was to be demolished, and the landscape restituted. Because the irony of it all is that the complex was built on virgin land that was “especially protected”.