A row has erupted over a planned theme park in Calais that its mayor hopes will rehabilitate the image of a town tainted by its association with squalid migrant camps.
The 300 million ($488 million) theme park, Heroic Land, will be built on a 50ha site only 3km from the Jungle camps where about 6000 migrants hoping to cross the Channel to Britain are sheltering.
Due to open in 2019, it will be France's fifth largest adventure park, featuring 32 attractions with themes as diverse as Lord of the Rings, Japanese manga cartoons and Jules Verne, the French author of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
Mayor Natacha Bouchart, hopes it will transform Calais into a tourist resort and revive the local economy. "It offers innovations that don't exist in other theme parks," she said.
However, 10 Socialist MPs in northern France have complained that the project is being pushed through without public consultation. The French Government has funded a 220,000 feasibility study, supplemented by 400,000 from the regional council, but private investors are to come up with the cost of construction.
