Sagunto opens tender for a new €168,204 inclusive park in Plaza Padre Jaime
Sagunto City Council has opened a public tender worth €168,204 to build a new inclusive urban park in Plaza Padre Jaime, in Puerto de Sagunto, with a four-month construction deadline.
Sagunto City Council has taken the first administrative step towards completely transforming Plaza Padre Jaime, in the heart of Puerto de Sagunto (coastal district of Sagunto). Last week the council opened the public tender for the construction contract, with a budget of €168,204, VAT included, and a four-month deadline once the contract is awarded.
The project goes beyond replacing the square's worn-out furniture. The council's plan is to turn the whole space into a large inclusive urban park, designed as a multi-purpose meeting point for leisure, community life, physical activity and social inclusion for people of all ages and abilities. The council's stated goals also include removing the physical barriers that currently make it hard to move through the square, widening and diversifying the range of leisure and sports facilities available in the town, and giving the neighbourhood a landmark space that strengthens its identity and its ability to attract and keep visitors through more innovative facilities than those currently in place. These priorities reflect the council's broader approach to modernising public space: not just improving how the square looks, but making it practically useful for different groups of residents, from families with children to people with reduced mobility.
The design is split into four separate areas. The first is for young children under three, with adapted play equipment and safety flooring. The second is a multi-purpose zone fitted with table-tennis tables and a teqball table — teqball is a Hungarian-born sport that mixes football rules with table-tennis-style play on a curved table measuring 3 metres long and 1.7 metres wide. Despite its short history, teqball is one of the fastest sports to win international recognition: its governing body was endorsed by the Olympic Council of Asia in 2018 and gained full membership of the Global Association of International Sports Federations in 2020. The third area reuses the current basketball court, with resurfaced flooring, updated sports equipment and a refreshed surrounding area. The fourth zone repeats the play-area concept for children aged three to twelve, with more complex equipment designed to encourage both physical activity and inclusive play. In this way, the square will bring together classic playground equipment with newer, more active leisure formats aimed at different age groups.
Alongside these four areas, all the square's street furniture will be fully renewed, meeting standards for sustainability, universal accessibility, landscape integration, vandalism resistance, durability and low maintenance cost. The whole project will follow a single design theme, "Mar e Islas" (Sea and Islands), giving the future park its own recognisable visual identity within Puerto de Sagunto's urban landscape. The project's name itself reflects the coastal identity of this district, historically shaped by its relationship with the port and the seafront — a different character from Sagunto Centro, the town's historic core, where the council's other major square renovation is planned.
Javier Raro, the councillor for Public Space and Mobility, has explained that this tender marks a shift from the council's usual approach to squares and playgrounds, which until now has mostly focused on renewing shaded areas — that is, adding shade structures to existing playgrounds rather than fully rebuilding the space. According to the councillor, the plan is to gradually tackle a more ambitious urban transformation, square by square, without neglecting routine maintenance of the town's other playgrounds.
The Plaza Padre Jaime project will not be the only one of its kind. The council has already announced that next year it will open a similar tender for Plaza Bicentenario de José Romeu, better known to residents as Parque del Agua (Water Park), north of the Palancia river in the city's historic centre. Through this, the council intends to gradually extend the same inclusive, multi-purpose park model to other parts of the municipality, alternating projects between Puerto de Sagunto and Sagunto Centro.
For residents, the most immediate change will come down to process and timing: the tender will now follow the standard public procurement steps, with the bidding conditions published and a deadline for interested companies to submit offers, before a winning contractor is announced. If everything proceeds smoothly, the works could be finished in just four months from the start date, making the renewed square one of the main public-space developments in Puerto de Sagunto over the coming months. Until then, the square will remain in everyday use.
According to aytosagunto.es, with additional background from Wikipedia on teqball.