Spain’s soccer player Andres Iniesta helps to plant a stake yesterday in a symbolic act of planting a tree during a WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature) reforestation programme, which is part of the promotional event for the film The Smurfs 2, in the Juzcar.
Reuters/Juzcar, Spain
A Spanish hilltop village has found a way to chase away the country’s recession blues by keeping all its buildings blue, the way they were painted in 2011 for a promotion for a Smurf movie.
“We calculate that around 210,000 tourists have visited us since we painted ourselves blue two years ago, and people keep on coming,” Juzcar Mayor David Fernandez said yesterday.
Tourism is one of the few bright spots in Spain’s recession-bound economy.
A traditional village nestled amongst chestnut forests in the southern region of Andalusia, Juzcar, with a population of fewer than 250 people, painted everything blue, including its church and village hall, when it was chosen by Sony Pictures to host an event to promote the movie The Smurfs 3D.
Promoters pledged to repaint the town white after the event, but residents voted to keep it blue because of the economic benefits brought by tourists.
The fictional blue creatures are based on a Belgian cartoon series, where they are depicted as living in mushroom-like houses.
