Veliaj Presents New Projects for Tirana

At Wednesday's meeting of the Municipal Council, the mayor of Tirana, Erion Veliaj, presented some of the projects that will be added to the capital, among them the New Theatre, the rehabilitation of the Botanical Garden, the new stadium "Selman Stërmasi", and even the Museum of Tirana. 

He said that there will be an official inauguration of the Pyramid, which, according to him, will be the largest center of innovation and digitalization technology, not only in Albania, but in the entire Region. 

"We have several new city projects and one of them is the new "Selman Stërmasi" stadium. Sport has received, not only from Tirana, the European City of Sport, but in recent years we have given it an extraordinary impulse. It is enough to look at the level of medals and the quality of the athletes, it was clearly money well spent by the Municipality of Tirana. 90% of our Olympic team are from the Municipality of Tirana, from Sport Club Tirana. The time has come for us to move from a building where there are travel agencies or electronic games, to an asset for Tirana. The time has come for Tirana to have a Museum of modern art, the National Gallery is under reconstruction. We have conceived a land that is at the end of New Boulevard, while the Museum of Tirana has been conceived at Sarajet. We may have different beliefs, but the law says that only the Institute of Cultural Monuments declares cultural monuments. We can have political beliefs, we can have our debates, but either it is or it is not a cultural monument, it cannot be by desire and passion, it is by law and a commission. We also have Sarajet, when for the first time in the Municipality of Tirana we allocated a fund to buy these buildings, as we did with the Kosova school, with Sarajet and so we did with the Libohovite building. The Libohovit building will be transferred to the Ministry of Culture as an investment, which means that we have no financial obligations. In Sarajet, it is the Municipality of Tirana that will make the investment", said Veliaj. 

Meanwhile, he added several other projects: "We want the Convention and Exhibition Center to be reflected in the budget as well. We held a competition where Maksimiliano Fuksas was declared the winner. With so many events happening here, with so many activities happening here, the Palace of Congresses is exhausted today. We want to have the new convention and exhibition center at the other end of Tirana, at the New Boulevard. We are in the legal process, which is coming to an end, for the Botanical Garden. I believe that the proof of what we can do and what potential the Botanical Garden has, beyond political beliefs, is only 100 meters away from the Zoo, from a zoo when once the lion ate potatoes and the wolf was depressed on those cement tiles, while today we are in a didactic space where we also have classes for children, an underground parking for the community, animal species have been added that we did not have before. We are awaiting the finalization of that process. The "Asllan Rusi" handball stadium is a building from the time of Italy, it used to be an aircraft hangar. The proposal we have is to make an intervention there as well and really turn it into a basketball and volleyball arena, as befits a European city like Tirana".