1 · Why it is in this register at all
Dream Island is admitted as a mixed-use development, not as an attraction: the complex holds a hotel, a concert hall, a cinema, restaurants and shops alongside the park, and the Library’s test for this Part is whether a guest can reach the rest of it through the bed. Approved by the Moscow urban planning commission in May 2015 and opened on 29 February 2020, it is described as Europe’s largest indoor theme park, roofed so that it works through a Moscow winter. The façade is a fairytale castle with a 75-metre central tower, and the interior streets imitate Rome with a miniature Colosseum, Barcelona with Gaudí, and London.
2 · ⚑ It was conceived on a licence it did not open with
Regions Group signed with DreamWorks in 2013 for the rights to Shrek, Madagascar, Kung Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon, and the park was planned around them. It opened with Hello Kitty, the Smurfs, Hotel Transylvania, the Ninja Turtles and Soyuzmultfilm characters instead. The Library records the change without explaining it, because the explanation is not established — but it belongs beside LHL-004 Palazzo Versace and LHL-S-161 the Givenchy spa as another case of a place built around a name that was not there when the doors opened.
3 · ⚑ What was on the ground before, which the sources do not agree on
One account places the site in the former ZIL industrial zone along the Nagatinka; another calls it a former recreational area; a third asserts that 150 acres of trees and habitat were destroyed in construction. These are three different claims about the same hundred hectares and the Library resolves none of them. The third rests on a weak source and is recorded as a claim rather than a fact, flagged rather than repeated — a register that passed it along as established would be doing the thing it exists to avoid.
4 · The money, and the pause
Investment is given as $1.5 billion and as €800 million; VTB lent 37 billion roubles. Building began on 17 March 2016, stopped in early 2017 for financial reasons, and resumed after refinancing late that year. The visitor projection was 7.5 million a year. ⚑ Neither the outturn against that projection nor the current ownership is established here, and the entry does not guess at either.
5 · Candour
⚑ This is one of the thinner entries in Part X and says so. The English-language record is promotional or encyclopaedic and the Russian trade press was not read for it. Nothing here establishes how the hotel inside the complex is operated, by whom, or whether it belongs in Part IV as a house in its own right — which is the question the Library would most want answered and the one its sources do not address.