Mini Ikea comes to Alicante

WHILE many will welcome the opening of the new “Ikea Deseña” at Alicante’s Gran Via shopping centre, it is also seen as acceptance that the area is now unlikely to see the full sized store that has been in the pipeline (off and on) for a decade. If this had come to fruition it would have created an estimated 4,000 jobs with an investment of €250 million. An area in Rabasa had been set aside for the project which seemed to likely to go ahead for a while but various political machinations have put it, at best, on the back boiler.   Ikea Deseña, which already has outlets in the province at Benidorm and Ondara, is a design service and ordering point and is 100 metres square as opposed to its original big brother Ikea which would have been about the size of a shopping centre in its own right. Nonetheless local fans of the flat pack giant at least now have a small version of the store locally, without travelling to Valencia or Murcia where the nearest superstores are based. The new Alicante outlet is due to open in July.