Madrid's international Barajas airport is positioning itself as Europe's Atlantic gate after it undergoes a revamp which will double its capacity.
Already, the airport is the hub for about 25 percent of all flights from Europe to Latin America and the construction of a new terminal and two new runways should give a new lease of life of more than 15 years to Barajas which would otherwise have reached saturation point soon.
"In terms of capacity, Madrid airport is to become one of the top three in Europe," says Jose Manuel Hesse, overseeing construction of the new futuristic-style terminal comprising two parallel buildings.
The undulating, aluminium-covered roofs of the first building are attention-grabbing in themselves as they resemble "the flapping wings of a seagull", in the words of a spokesman for Spain's Aena airport authority.
Bamboo brought in from China covers the immense ceiling held up by steel supports and painted in a range of colours. The warmest tones have been reserved for the northern section, the work of British architect Richard Rogers and Antonio Lamela of Spain.
Metallic panels filter sunlight through the large bay windows into the wide halls of the new fourth terminal, set to come on stream in September 2005. By then, the airport will be able to handle about 70 million passangers, double today's capacity.
The new installations at Barajas, 13 kilometres (nine miles) northeast of Madrid, will also virtually double plane parking capacity from a current 110 to more than 200.
The new runways, equipped with low visibility take off and landing technology, will take the total to four and afford the airport some of the most modern facilities in the world with two jets able henceforth to take off and two more to land simultaneously.
A new computerised system will be introduced for the terminal and baggage handling will be completely automated.
A thorny issue has been the 4.7-billion-euro (six-billion-dollar) cost of the project. The Socialist government recently revised an initial cost forecast which was a billion euros less but members of the conservative government ousted last March insist that their figures were bona fide.
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