The UK lost it's only chance of having a Theme Park, during the 1980, when it was proposed to build a Disney Theme Park near Blackpool. But it was turned down by Blackpool Borough Council because of loosing tourism to Blackpool itself. So Disneyland decided to build it near Paris instead.
Thats not the whole story. Blackpool was scraped super fast in the candidates process (and not only because Blackpool Borough Council said no), and was decided that becuase of the climate it was better placed in Spain, in one of the smaller towns near Valencia, as it was very similar to the climate of Anaheim in California (Andalucia was also a candidate but was scrapped becuase of the soil, and Paris was also scrapped because of the harsh winters). The spanish government during that time, that was pro-Andalucia, told disney that if they wanted to place the park in spain, it had to be there. Disney had some secret talks with the community government of Valencia, that even went to america to talk about it. At the end, because they had so many problems with the central spanish governement and (for some stupid reason) the wife of Eisner (and other wifes of the high people at Disney at the time) really loved Paris, they decided to put the park then at the end. French governement didnt had a problem with it, something that helped. The problem came that french people didnt want an american park in their country at the time (and the park was going to be placed on some orchards that give worked to farming people, that really hated the park idea). When they did the presentation of the park to put the first foundation, they were thrown tomatoes.
The park opened in 1992 with a horrible number of visitors, again the biggest problem is that france didnt want the park, and didnt have the power to attract other european visitors as disney wanted, because it didnt have this big attracting ride.
This changed when in 1995 their most attracting ride, was opened, Space Mountain. With a really agressive publicity campaign done for all the neighbouring european countries (the tv ad was amazing), and even more importantly, the name change of the park, that passed from Eurodisney to Disneyland Paris (frankly, shows how stupid is the human being and their reasoning to hate something), and the visitoris numbers started to to increase in big quantities.
I think thats the whole story, probably leaving something here and there, but the most important bits are there.
Theres some very obscure art of disneyland Valencia (not the official name as it never had one, but I like to call it like that) idead flying through the web. No more than 3 or 4 drawings (to show to the spanish government at the time), mostly showing a more summer like park than what Paris got, and with Jungle Cruise.
The sad thing about this, is that Eurodisney, had it been placed in Spain, could have get a really high amount of visitors from the start, and we would never had probably got the inferior theme parks with governement meddling we got at the end.
We could also have got european spash mountain
