Eden Project to explore Dundee as new tourist attraction venue

The Eden Project has named Dundee as the proposed location for a new international tourist attraction.

The charity's Cornwall site, billed as "the largest indoor rainforest in the world", attracts about a million visitors a year.

It will begin work on a feasibility study next month to establish a suitable site and begin developing content ideas for the new attraction.

Its chief executive said the new venture could be open by 2024.

Dundee City Council leader John Alexander said the project's working group would go into the study with a "very open mind" when it came to a location.

He said: "We have lots of potential options, some of them have been mentioned, it might be something like Camperdown Park.

"But, nonetheless, it might also be an industrial site. There might be something around the water and connectivity to water, so maybe something Riverside-wise.

"We want to go into that and take forward the conversation with Eden and see what their thinking is, and to then try and fit that within the city somewhere."

Eden is currently developing a number of projects in areas including China, Australia, and Derry/Londonderry.

The original Eden Project, located near St Austell in Cornwall, opened in March 2001.

The charity says its "transformational and regenerative" projects have a theme of "humanity's connection to the natural world."

David Harland, chief executive of Eden Project International, said the feasibility study would take five or six months with a project lifespan of "four years from now, if everything went well, to opening."

He told the BBC's Good Morning Scotland it would be "a project of Dundee".

He said: "It would be terrible for us to just turn up and inflict something that the people didn't want there.

"Will it be a rainforest? Almost certainly no.

"Will it have some fabulous feature and will it be something that people want to visit from all over the world? We certainly hope so."