The Lleida region of Pallars Jussà, with 13,000 inhabitants, is one of the most depopulated in Catalonia.
Like so many areas of the Pyrenees, it is unable to anchor its population due to a lack of job expectations and a chronic deficit in services.
In the nineties, in the Fosca Valley, one of the mountains in the area, a plan was woven to emerge from oblivion and launch into economic development.
There, the construction of a tourist complex that combined ski slopes, hotels and golf courses was planned.
In the municipality of La Torre de Capdella, all the hopes were concentrated in a project that, three decades later, only accumulates iron in the middle of the mountain, unfinished apartments and tons of disappointment.
Abandoned during the Great Recession, VallFosca Interllacs was left unfinished and orphaned by businessmen who wanted to exploit it.
The infrastructure has been put up for auction half a dozen times and has always been deserted.
Bidding started at 2.3 million euros.
Now, six auctions later, it has not sold either despite being offered for the modest figure of 352,500 euros.
The City Council has knocked again on the door of the Generalitat to revive this project of emptied Catalonia, but everything indicates that the Catalan Administration will not want to restart it.
Everyone admits that these are bad times for new ski resorts.
The Torre de Capdella is made up of 19 districts that have no more than 760 registered residents.
A project was presented there in 1998 that was going to turn the area into the goose that lays the golden eggs of the region.
In Espui it was planned to open a ski resort that aspired to be the benchmark in southern Europe.
They had planned 13 slopes with a total of 40 kilometers, nine chairlifts, their corresponding network of artificial snow, a golf course, 900 apartments and four hotels.
The 2008 crisis destroyed the plan.
Only 90 apartments were built and more than half remain empty or half-built.
The chairlift infrastructure was installed along with the snow cannon pipes.
There they remain, in the middle of a frozen mountain, with no one who loves them.
The complex has gone up for auction half a dozen times without a single buyer coming forward.
The mayor, Josep Maria Dalmau, claims to have held meetings with the Generalitat to, in one of the last attempts, try to open the ski slope and that "even if it is with a not so pharaonic project", the station becomes an economic boost for the region.
The conversations are timid and many of the neighbors, 16 years after the project was stopped, do not aspire to see it completed.
Abandoned sales booth belonging to the project promoter Albert García
The ambitious plan was baptized in the nineties as Vallfosca Interllacs Ski and the promoters even speculated on joining the resort's slopes with those of neighboring Boí-Taüll.
In 1998, the City Council approved an agreement with a company called Vallfosca Interllacs that was to develop the project, at a cost of 1,000 million euros.
In 2003, the Vallfosca Mountain Resort project was presented in Barcelona and they promised that in 2006 the complex would open and not only for skiers, it would also have a golf course.
From Espui a car would not be needed to go up to the slopes, since a cable car would allow direct transfer.
In addition, there would be an underground car park with 2,200 spaces.
In 2005 the real estate company Fadesa bought Vallfosca Interllacs and delayed the start-up of the station.
He assured that they would build 900 apartments and four hotels.
Two years later, the real estate company Martinsa acquired Fadesa and only one year later the great crisis broke out: the new Martinsa-Fadesa filed for bankruptcy.
The company's debt was 7,156 million euros.
That figure represented 97% of all its assets, and among them was the Vallfosca-Interllacs station.
Julià Hereu is a cow and mare rancher from Espui, as well as president of the Decentralized Municipal Entity of this town where between 15 and 30 people live.
Hereu remembers those years perfectly.
“In 2004 I left the cattle and started working on the construction site making these floors.
In 2007 it was already beginning to be noticed that something was wrong and they started me to build the tracks.
There are millions buried there,” he laments while pointing to where the ski complex was being built.
Hereu abandoned construction a few months before the suspension of payments.
“In that booth there were three salespeople selling apartments.
My wife also worked for them and in the end they didn't pay her,” he complains.
16 years have passed and the wound is still open in a municipality where there are many vestiges of what that project was intended to be.
Among them, the concrete infrastructure of the chairlift that had to transport skiers to the slopes stands out, in addition to the abandoned apartments and the commercial booth.
There are graffiti calling for its demolition and even more modern ones against the plan to present a candidacy for the Winter Olympic Games in Catalonia.
Promotion of half-built apartments.
Albert Garcia
When the suspension of payments was presented, the golf course was finished, and the ski resort already had the structures for the chairlifts and the pipes to convey the artificial snow.
The mayor of La Torre de Capdella, Josep Maria Dalmau, assures that there are more than 15 million euros “buried” in infrastructure in the mountain.
There are also 90 apartments (of the 900 designed) built in Espui, most half-finished.
Only half were delivered.
“There are people who paid 270,000 euros for a two-bedroom apartment and are selling it for 80,000,” laments Hereu.
Last Wednesday, some workers began the work of installing fiber optics with the purpose of making these apartments more attractive for nomadic workers.
The Government of Pasqual Maragall in the Generalitat sought investors to revive the project and even valued the fact that Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat managed the ski slopes as it already does with those of Vall de Núria, La Molina or Boí Taüll.
Nothing materialized.
16 years have passed since the suspension of payments and the lack of snow has ended up burying aspirations.
No investor is attracted to the project.
Montse Llebot works in the only hotel in Espui, the Hotel Montseny, a small three-star family business that 16 years ago experienced the launch of the complex with great enthusiasm.
“We already consider it lost.
Furthermore, the structures they made cannot even be torn down for the amount of money it is worth.
They are part of our landscape,” Llebot is discouraged.
Aerial view of Espui, in the front row, with the promotion of half-built apartments.
Albert Garcia
The Martinsa-Fadesa project has been put up for auction at an increasingly lower price and, even so, it has not found a buyer.
In addition, the plots are becoming less and less desirable, since in 2020 the Generalitat classified some parts of the project as “unsustainable” and reclassified some land where 300 apartments were allowed to be built as a rural area.
In the other plots the buildability was reduced.
Be that as it may, 107,453 square meters have come up for auction on half a dozen occasions.
In 2018 the bankruptcy administrator requested 2.3 million euros for these plots.
After six empty bids, the last one is for 352,500 euros and there is no buyer either.
Dalmau maintains that he will do everything possible from the Consistory so that a hotel can be built and that the Generalitat resurrects the ski resort project that, for the moment, no one wants.
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