Moscow is to build a giant Disneyland-style theme park, which, at 300ha will be three times as big as Mickey Mouse’s home in Florida, artist and project leader Zurab Tsereteli said in the Russian capital on Friday.
The Moscow Wonder Park will take between five and seven years to complete on a peninsula in the River Moscow in the south of the city, said the ethnic Georgian sculptor, whose huge and often quizzical works already dot the skyline.
Divided into five sections — including one devoted to the main religions — it will be a ”magnificent, fairytale world inhabited by a number of characters” led by a main hero, Tsereteli told journalists.
”I cannot yet say if my hero will be a friend or rival to Mickey Mouse,” he said.
With planning now complete, work could now begin on building accommodation for an army of construction workers at the site.
Tsereteli did not specify an estimated cost for the theme park, which is to be financed by private investors.
Other projects he outlined included three-metre statues of the WWII Allied leaders Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt for the site of their 1945 meeting in the Crimea, and an 11m tear to be suspended in New York commemorating victims of the terrorist
attacks of September 11, 2001.
”I won the rights to erect the memorial in a competition,” the Interfax news agency quoted him as saying. – Sapa-DPA