Scenic but overlooked, Zaragoza pins tourism hopes on '08 fair

Two thousand years ago, Roman legions built a trading post on the Ebro River in northeast Spain. They named it Caesaraugusta after their emperor at the time, Caesar Augustus. The city fell to Goth invaders in the fifth century, to Moors from North Africa in the eighth century and then to Christian armies in the 12th century.

Today, Zaragoza, as the city is now known, is Spain's sixth largest city, and it's packed with remnants of all these cultures and others, from Roman walls and baths to Moorish palaces and medieval cathedrals. What's more, it's home to one of Spain's holiest relics, a jasper pillar atop which the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared to the apostle St. James in 40 A.D.

Zaragoza is a mere hour-and- a-half by high-speed train from Madrid, and other rail lines and highways link it to three other Spanish cities: Barcelona, Valencia and Bilbao. So why isn't Zaragoza jammed with tourists?

"We live in the shadows of Spain's most popular tourist destinations," said Constanza Hernandez, a spokeswoman for the Zaragoza Tourism Board.

The agency's statistics show that out of Spain's 55.6 million yearly visitors from other countries, Zaragoza hosts a mere 136,000. And of Spain's 890,000 yearly visitors from the U.S., just 6,300 bed down in Zaragoza, typically for a short one- or two-night stay.

Conversely, Barcelona draws 295,000 annual visitors from the U.S., and Madrid hosts 215,000.

However, Zaragoza does host a sizable number of day visitors. Many are Spanish pilgrims coming to worship in the city's Basilica del Pilar, home to the aforementioned six-foot-high pillar. Others are traveling between Madrid and Barcelona and stop just  long enough to do a little sightseeing and have lunch in a tapas restaurant.

Near the basilica are the romanesque La Seo Cathedral and the Gothic Palacio de la Lonja. All told, Zaragoza offers 200 historical sites, including a classic Islamic palace known as the Aljaferia.

Starting in mid-2008, local officials expect to see their historical sites, museums, restaurants and shops brimming with overnight guests, including a much higher number of foreigners, and among those a lot more relatively big-spending visitors from the U.S.

The big spark: Expo in 2008

Just across the Ebro from Zaragoza, thousands of workers are turning a stretch of land about half the size of New York's Central Park into Expo Zaragoza, a $2 billion World's Fair-like project to open June 14, 2008. The event is expected to draw 6 million visitors over three months, said project spokesman Ricardo Martin.

Sanctioned by the Paris-based Bureau of International Expositions, Expo Zaragoza will have the theme "Water and Sustainable Development." 

Major features will include a 60-acre exhibition area packed with water-related pavilions and plazas under the flags of some 100-plus participating nations, flanked by a 300-acre water park.

Expo's signature building will be a 196-foot-high tower shaped like a teardrop turned on its side.

Planners have scheduled 3,400 activities, including presentations and workshops, ceremonies and a variety of shows.

After Expo, Martin said that virtually everything on the site, from the water park to a 1,450-seat conference center, will be converted to commercial and leisure attractions -- including a nine-mile, "open-air museum" along the Ebro -- aimed at repositioning Zaragoza as a major tourist destination.

Readying for Expo, hoteliers are increasing the city's lodging capacity by 50%. According to a ZTB report, 15 hotels are in development to add 1,740 rooms to Zaragoza's inventory of 3,468 rooms. Twelve of the new properties will be upper-end, including 1,287 rooms in 10 four-star hotels, 80 rooms in the city's fourth five-star property and 178 rooms in Zaragoza's first, and Spain's 30th, "Grand Luxe"-rated hotel.

To be named Reina Petronila, the latter property will soar 12 floors above Aragonia, a two-block-long complex of business, shopping, entertainment and residential sections under development downtown.

The Reina Petronila and one of the new four-star hotels, the 137-room Rey Alfonso, will be additions to the upscale Palafox portfolio, joining Zaragoza's existing five-star Hotel Palafox and the four-star Hotel Goya.

Menno Overvelde, sales executive of the Hotel Palafox, said the Expo is "going to put Zaragoza on the map ... we're doing in two years what [without Expo] would have taken 20 years."

Hernandez added that the tourism board expected the Expo to do "what the [1992] Olympics did for Barcelona and the [1992] World's Fair did for Seville."

Patricia Wood Winn, press and public relations manager for the Chicago office of the Tourist Office of Spain, said Expo promoters will be targeting the U.S. market in an advertising campaign begun overseas in 2006 and scheduled to break domestically this year.

She noted that a new, high-speed rail link from Barcelona to Zaragoza will be in operation by the time Expo opens, complementing the existing high-speed service to Zaragoza from Madrid.

For more information, visit www.turismozaragoza.com, the Expo site at www.expozaragoza2008.es or the Tourist Office of Spain's site at www.okspain.org.

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