- Environmental authorisation granted for €290 million engine centre at Port of Seville
- Facility to overhaul up to 200 turbofan engines annually creating 950 jobs
- Site covers 94,000 square metres in port’s Free Trade Zone
- Ryanair considering Polish alternative before final decision by year-end
- Centre expected operational around 2030 with four-year construction timeline
Ryanair has received the environmental authorisation required to proceed with a new €290 million engine maintenance centre at the Port of Seville, after the Junta de Andalucía granted a Unified Environmental Authorisation for the project in late August 2026. The approval clears the way for construction to begin at the port’s Free Trade Zone on a site of over 94,000 square metres, with the facility aimed at overhauling up to 200 turbofan engines annually. The centre would create approximately 950 jobs, 600 of them direct, representing one of the largest single MRO investments an Irish airline has made outside Ireland.
The complex is planned to include multiple maintenance hangars alongside administration and support buildings, handling the full cycle of engine disassembly, cleaning, repair, testing and reassembly for Ryanair’s Boeing 737 fleet. Seville was not Ryanair’s only option, with the airline weighing rival bids from a site in Poland, as well as competing proposals from Italy, the Baltic states and the Czech Republic, as it looked to build in-house engine overhaul capacity to reduce its reliance on third-party MRO providers. Ryanair Chief Executive Eddie Wilson has indicated that the airline will confirm its final decision between Seville and the Polish alternative before the end of the year, though the Andalusian authorisation gives the Spanish site a considerable head start.
Under the terms of the environmental approval, Ryanair has up to four years to complete construction, with the centre expected to become operational around 2030. Ryanair already operates a wide network of engineering and heavy maintenance bases, including Prestwick, Shannon, Wroclaw, Kaunas, Dublin and an existing airframe maintenance operation at Seville itself, but none of these currently overhaul engines in-house. If the project proceeds, the new Port of Seville facility would fill that gap, giving Ryanair its first dedicated in-house engine shop and marking a further step in the airline’s push to reduce its reliance on third-party providers as its Boeing 737 MAX fleet continues to grow through the rest of the decade.
