The Spanish government has approved a plan to sell of a quarter of its state-owned properties in a bid to raise hundreds of millions and boost the government's empty coffers. In plans approved last week by Spain's cabinet, some 15 thousand properties - from office buildings to agricultural land - will be put up for sale over the next seven years. The measure is the latest in a series of moves to bring Spain's budget deficit to within the EU target of 3 percent by 2016 from 7.1 percent of GDP last year. A parliamentary commission has drawn up an extensive list of assets that will be sold to private investors in the hope of raising millions to reduce its public deficit. Among those being offered include disused army barracks, an aerodrome on the island of Minorca, a military shooting range and thousands of office buildings. The government said the portfolio will include around 10 buildings "considered unique" that it hopes will be snapped up by potential investors. Among those is a mansion house on Madrid's central avenue, the Paseo de la Castellana, that used to house the Secretary of State for Security, and a country estate in Andalusia comprising 35 thousand acres of natural parkland planted with cork trees. Mariano Rajoy's conservative government announced plans last year to set up a commission to draw up an inventory of all state-owned property and identify those that could be sold off. The first properties to go under the hammer include the former headquarters of RTVE, Spain's state television and radio channel in Madrid and Galicia, and a disused army barracks in Seville. The government has not yet released the portfolio of properties for sale over the next seven years or said whether they will be sold by auction or by public tender. The government is yet to outline how much money it hopes to raise in the asset sell-off. Last year Spain's government raised 90 million euros in sales of state-owned buildings that had lain empty and made a further 37.5 million euros saving by renegotiating rental contracts. Much of the rural property that will be put on the market will be offered with the opportunity for development to create local jobs. For example, La Almoraima, a finca in the Natural Park of Alcornocales, which has been owned by the Ministry of Environment since 1983, is being sold with the option to develop a resort with two golf courses and a five-star hotel. Several months ago Greece's cash-strapped government also detailed its plans to sell 28 state-owned buildings on long-term lease, including tax offices, ministry buildings, and the main police headquarters in Athens.

A huge new city for pilgrims covering an area of 1.6 million square meters with a capacity to handle 200 thousand visitors is being planned for Saudi Arabia's holy city in Madinah. The new city will be aimed at accommodating the large number of visitors who flock to the city to make Hajj and Umrah pilgrimages. The project will be based close to the Al Masjid Al Nabawi - the Prophet's Mosque and will include a number of hotels and furnished apartments, a railway and bus station, offices of government agencies and a 400-bed hospital. The project has been welcomed by Muslim organizations and state-owned Public Investment Fund will finance the project. Construction is expected to start during several months.

Conservation work at the crumbling ancient Roman city of Pompeii began. The whole project budget estimated US$ 142 million and the EU is contributing US$ 56 million to the project which should be completed by 2015. The new preservation campaign follows a series of structural collapses at the popular tourist site near Naples -- including at the House of Gladiators, a building used for training the arena warriors, which collapsed into a heap of rubble in 2010. The collapses have been blamed on years of mismanagement and underfunding. Buried by falling ash when nearby Mt. Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79, buildings, streets and even curled-up corpses were found preserved when Pompeii was rediscovered in 1748. Today, the site draws 2.3 million visitors a year. Now work is beginning on two buildings, known as the Criptoportico and the Casa dei Dioscuri. The fresh funding will be used to help protect the site from heavy rains that have contributed to the collapses, and to restore frescoes and increase security. The new funds also will be put toward strengthening crumbling Roman villas, restoring damaged frescoes and improving video surveillance across the 44-hectare site.

Abu Dhabi staked its claim as the cultural capital of the Middle East on January 8 with the final go-ahead for its most eagerly anticipated landmark project. The main contract for the Louvre Abu Dhabi was awarded to the Dubai builder Arabtec. Construction of the US$ 653 million development will begin immediately and the new museum is expected to open in 2015. The Louvre Abu Dhabi, which arose out of a 2007 cultural partnership between France and the United Arab Emirates, won't look anything like the lavish 12th century building where Louis XIV once lived. The mushroom-shaped building designed by French architect Jean Nouvel, the Pritzker Prize winner, is slated to be part of a cultural district planned for Saadiyat Island. The architecturally stunning complex will consist of 64,000 square meters of pavilions, plazas and canals, two-thirds of it shaded by a 180-meter wide cupola that appears to float in mid air. The new museum will form the heart of the Saadiyat Island cultural district alongside the Zayed National Museum planned to open in 2016 and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi the following year. The construction challenges are considerable. A 180-metre wide cupola supported at just four points around its perimeter will shade two-thirds of the museum campus. Perforated to cast an intricate "rain of light" below, the dome will be made of more than 100,000 individual elements in 10 layers that will overlap to form a pattern inspired by Islamic geometry and the palm fronds of traditional Arish dwellings. The Louvre Abu Dhabi will be housed in 9,200 square meters of gallery space spread across almost 30 separate buildings. Planned like a town, these range from one to three storey in height and are linked by a network of gardens, plazas and watercourses inspired by traditional Arabian falaj. The scope of the architecture and public areas may sound prodigious, but these pale in comparison to the design, engineering and infrastructure challenges that have been overcome to get the project to this stage. The museum requires a 10-metre deep waterproof basement for emergency access and plant rooms that measure 31,500 square meters. In 2009, walls were buried in the sand 40 meters deep to ensure the construction site stays watertight. Once works are complete, these will be removed to allow seawater to flow between the museum precincts in a series of canals. In 2010 alone, contractors drove 4,536 piles into the ground - 2,958 steel and 1,578 concrete - the length of which, if put end to end, is the distance from Abu Dhabi to Dubai. Most of this work has gone unnoticed. The only visible sign of progress thus far has been a curious, wedge-shaped chamber on Saadiyat in which a 1:33 scaled model of the museum's canopy, made of 15,000 aluminum and steel parts, has been light-tested to ensure its performance. But behind the scenes an international team of architects and engineers has been working for almost five years, testing the dome for factors including its ability to cast the right type of shade, and its resistance to wind, explosions and fire. Most of the preparatory work associated with the Louvre Abu Dhabi is already complete. All that remains is the small matter of delivering the more tangible parts of what will be one of the early 21st century's most anticipated architectural projects.

A new indoor wooden theatre was built next to Shakespeare's Globe in London and it will be named after the Globe's founder Sam Wanamaker, reported the BBC. The 340-seat theatre, which is scheduled to stage its first public performances in January 2014, will enable the Globe to offer live theatre throughout the year. This is because the open-air Globe theatre only stages productions from April to October. Plays in the indoor venue will run from October to April, with other events over the summer, such as early chamber music and opera. The design of the theatre is based on a series of drawings found at Worcester College Oxford in the 1960s, believed to be the earliest set of designs for an English theatre in existence. The team behind the project has revealed that plays at the new theatre will be predominantly lit by candles. Entering this timber hand-crafted candle-lit intimate space will be like tripping into the 1600s. When the Globe complex opened in 1997, the indoor theatre was left as a shell and has served as workshop and rehearsal studios. Now construction is fully under way, but another US$ 1.6 million needs to be raised to meet the US$ 12 million cost of the project, which receives no government subsidy.