EXCLUSIVE: GIBRALTARÂ’S NEW ISLAND
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07 April, 2006 06:05
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Work is to start within a fortnight on sinking the series of submarine piles that will form the foundations of the man-made “Heart Island” which will become an integral part of developer Greg Butcher’s £100 million luxury Ocean Village taking shape at Marina Bay. Sales of the almost 150 apartments and penthouses which comprise Phase II of the project were launched on Wednesday – and were taken up within hours of the launch.
“The plans for Heart Island and the successful launch of the two new apartment blocks shows that Ocean Village goes from strength to strength,” Butcher said after the sales launch. “to help attract more high-spending visitors and residents, Gibraltar needs the sort of life-style that Ocean Village and its environment will offer.”
The island – rising partly in front of Taylor Woodrow’s waterfront “TradeWinds” apartment blocks (and said by some to be Butcher’s way of cocking a snook at the rival developer, following Butcher’s failure to obtain the TradeWinds site) – will form the platform on which a five-storey leisure and business complex is to be built.
Negotiations are currently under way between the developer and both Barclays Bank and the Casino to acquire premises in the block. A team from Barclays’ property division in London has visited the site and prepared detailed plans for the two floors which the bank proposes to occupy. And security experts from the bank were in
Gibraltar this week for discussions on this aspect of planning for the site.
Talks between the developers and the Casino, which would switch its operations from its present site near the Rock Hotel to the top two floors of Heart Island, are continuing, VOX has learnt. However, several other international companies are also interested in becoming tenants…including a hotel group which sees the island as a potential site for a five star hotel, another Spar group and a leisure and tourist group which operates successful “living museums” in Europe, including a World War I “experience” at Ypres in Belgium, and the Hans Christian Andersen museum in Copenhagen.
Butcher has visited both living museums recently and believes that a Gibraltar/Mediterranean-style living museum would be a massive tourist draw card.
“I would really like to see something like that developed here,” Butcher said. “The museum at Ypres was particularly impressive, almost spine chilling, as one more through scenes and atmospheric scenery – as well as sound and light effects – that gave one a sense of what it must have been to have lived and fought in the trenches and battlefields of France and Flanders in the Great War.”
The last of the boats moored at the old Sheppard’s Marina quay will be moved this weekend, VOX was told. This means that the piling rig will be able to start work unhindered. Work on the island and its building is expected to be complete by the end of the year.
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