Gambling in Spain

Place your bets on Euro Vegas

Madrid and Barcelona seek a jobs jackpot from a giant gambling resort

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Readers' comments



complutense in reply to Captain Cuttle

Sorry to say, Catalunya is Spain, like it or not. It was a part of the Aragonese kingdom and since the XVth century a part of the unified Monarchy. I do not know what will happen in the future, but the same incertainty can be predicated about Scotland, Flandres, Corsica or large parts of the United States that were part of Mexico, were taken by the US after a war of agression and are now largely populated by Hispanics. The future is not written in the wall, but the present is what it is.

complutense in reply to Connect The Dots

No one expects the English Inquisiton, to that matter. England has killed more Irish for been Irish and Catholics than protestants were executed by the Inquisition in its entire history ( just take a look at the numbers: the Inquisition condemned to execution no more than 2000 to 5000 victims in three centuries of history whilst the English killed around 100.000 Catholic Irish just in the Nine Years War, not to talk about the death toll in other wars and famines and the reduction to slavery of thousands of Irish). Besides, under Elisabeth I many English Catholics were atrociously executed and deprived of their property, something that so many anglo-protestant books simply ignore.

Captain Cuttle in reply to Ter Wecsel

Having lived in Catalunya (not 'Spain') for many years I could not disagree more. However the suggestion that the long hoped for and hard won right to be free of tabacco smoke in public places is now in jeopardy horrifes me.

Ter Wecsel

Living in Spain is rather like a casino already. The luck of the draw determines whether you get decent service, that people are not on strike. And most of all, whether you get a job


Perhaps El Prat is a best idea, not only is it nearest to the beach but also to the tourist zone. But I think there are more arguments like Madrid airport has international flies, it is in the middle of Spain and better communicated then the catalan one.

I don’t like this casino, I’ve visited the Prat zone, there is an agronomic park which I think must be conserved.

In addition, I prefer to be poor than to have the mafia and similar associations near my house.

And to finish I think it isn’t a good idea, perhaps you are right and we don’t work as well as we have to. That’s why it’d be better to select another place.

AlmirRA in reply to AnaGM

It's realy disturbing to find a country like Spain in the humiliating situation of pleading to a foreign oligarch to save the country with such an delirious gambling project. What could be next after the cassino? Brothels all over Spain to cope with unemployment?


I'm not sure a casino that big will be the draw SA thinks it will be, but if he doesn't build it near El Prat, right on the Med, he's an idiot. There are so many pluses building it there than next to Barrajas, out in the middle of nowhere, not to mention the differences in winter time weather between the two. Plus there's the fact that you're a lot closer to the Costa Brava in the summer time as well. It's a no brainer. The only issue is the debt LVS would have to add to the pile they already have. I'd rather see them pay some of that down instead of embarking on another multi billion dollar building spree.

berkeley1 in reply to guest-wssieia

Wow, that's quite a rant in demonstrating ignorance of world's history, considering that Native-Americans in the British colonized US live in reserves while in the Hispanic colonized America represent a large percentage of the total population. In British colonized Australia natives were considered "flora and fauna" by law by the English monarchs in the 19th century, while in the 16th century Elizabeth the Catholic judged Christopher Columbus for slavery.

Luo Huanma

Unlike the U.S. China or South-east Asia, there are quite a lot of gambling casinos in Europe, some as renowned as Montecarlo's or Estoril's. Even in Spain there are probably well over a dozen of them.
Mr. Adelson must have some secret plans because gambling will certainly not be enough to fulfil his expectations.

Yours for now

Pathetic, in most layman terms, pathetic. How's the spanish economy going to recover any edge with a gigantic project based on gambling? Is that the infrastructure the country needs to get the head out of the water? no, I bet on that.


Barcelona has a serious problem of independentismo and suffers an economic boycott of the rest of the country. Barcelona suffers a great economic decadence for it. Euro Vegas plains that an economic boycott would suffer if he was establishing in Barcelona.


One problem that never seems to get mentioned in this debate is that federal gambling laws would have to be changed as well. In order to enter a casino in Spain, clients are obliged to present a piece of federally-recognized ID (such as a passport) and have that number recorded. It's not like Vegas, where you can just walk in off the street as if you were buying milk. While the regions may be drooling over the potential revenue, I know more than a few national police officers who are wondering a) under what pretenses the laws will be bent and/or changed; and b) how this isn't going to lead to wide-scale money laundering by mafias who use casino winnings and losses as a way of getting dodgy cash off their hands.

Vics Booming in reply to MarianoBlanco

Madrid growth is a bubble only sustained because the goverment does it's best to hide it. Were Bankia a bank from Valencia or Andalusia, it would have already been the biggest bluff in spanish history. If Eurovegas was build in Barcelona, their visitors would come from all over Europe (about 2 hours flight distance), and this, believe it or not, is much more people than a handful of spanish nationalist eager to boycott anything that smells catalan.

MarianoBlanco in reply to Vics Booming

Catalonia grows economically less than the average than Spain, Madrid very above. Something of this decline of Catalonia is because many Spanish citizens we do not buy made products or with headquarters in Catalonia. Many Spanish citizens we would not travel to EuroVegas.



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