The celebration of the foundation of the cornerstone of Porto Franco business and leisure center was held in the heart of Tallinn 23.08.2018. The list of guests, fresh daily newspapers, commemorative coins, sketches of architects, etc. were placed in the time capsule of the cornerstone. The speeches were made by the Mayor of Tallinn Taavi Aas, the Chairman of the Board of the largest Porto Franco tenant, Norwegian hotel chain Citybox, Martin Smith-Sivertsen, architects Mihkel Tüür and Ott Kadarik, the board member of the construction company Kontek Int AS Mart Urbas, the Chairman of the Board of Porto Franco OÜ Rauno Teder and historian Jaak Juske. “Porto Franco will be an excellent way out to the sea. We always dreamed and talked about opening the city to the sea, which meant not that the sea would see the city, but that the sea would also have a colorful life, that there could have been something to do”, – Mayor of Tallinn Taavi Aas said at the celebration of laying the cornerstone. “When the architect Rein Zobel studied the development of Tallinn in the Middle Ages, he was able to come to the conclusion that the determining factor in the formation of the city is the relief of the land and the location of the port,” – said architect Mihkel Tüür. “The surface area of Tallinn rises by a couple of mm per year, as a result of which the port is shifting away from the Old Town, and we have a historic opportunity to build this area that now separates the Old Town from the sea. This possibility does not occur very often, and therefore the new city structure and architectural solution in this place should be decent enough to create a new modern heart of the city between the medieval Old Town of Tallinn and the port”.

“A cornerstone is a symbolic gesture, but at the same time is something very tangible: from thoughts and drawings it becomes the result of doings and actions. We have in place not only the basement, as usual in case of construction after the cornerstone, but also 3 underground floors of the 1st building”, – said the Chairman of the Board of Porto Franco OÜ Rauno Teder at the ceremony of the foundation of the cornerstone. “Today in the construction we have reached the level of the ground, and further stages of construction will be visible to everyone”. Performed the ensemble Svjata Vatra and the slackliner Tauri-Viljar Vahesaar. Porto Franco, which is due to be completed in 2020, is currently the largest real estate project in the Baltic States. This is a unique development project in the field of real estate, which will open the center of Tallinn to the sea. The center of business and leisure has the right to build a total of 150 000 sq m gross space, of which 70 000 sq m are under the ground and 80 000 sq m are above the ground. Leased area will be 65 000 sq m, it is divided approximately in twain between commercial and office premises. In the 1st building, which will be completed in 2019, the fully automatic hotel Citybox will open its doors. In the 3-floor underground parking there will be 1170 parking spaces. The total investment in Porto Franco is 190 mn €. The largest owners of the Porto Franco center are the DeltaMax Group OÜ (80%) of Teder family, the Bonaares OÜ of Lembit Lump and Amalfi AS of Heldur Meerits.