Airport of the Pacific

The Airport of the Pacific (Spanish: Aeropuerto del Pacífico), also known as the International Airport of the Pacific (Aeropuerto Internacional del Pacífico) or the Airport of the East (Aeropuerto de Oriente), is an under-construction joint-use civilian international airport and military base located in Conchagua, El Salvador. It will serve the city of La Unión and the planned Bitcoin City. The airport was proposed by Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele during his 2019 presidential campaign as a part of his Cuscatlán Plan and construction was approved by the Legislative Assembly on 26 April 2022. Preliminary terraforming began in March 2023 and construction began in 2025. The airport's construction has received opposition from landowners and residents in the area as well as concerns of the environmental impact it would have on the local ecosystem.

Ahead of the 2019 presidential election, then-presidential candidate Nayib Bukele published his Cuscatlán Plan, an outline of his objectives and goals as president of El Salvador; among his proposals included the construction of a new airport in eastern El Salvador. Bukele stated that many of the passengers who passed through El Salvador's Saint Óscar Romero International Airport in south-central El Salvador live in eastern El Salvador. He argued that a new airport in the east would simultaneously ease congestion of El Salvador's main international airport and both bring jobs and an economic boost to the east of the country. On 9 March 2020, the Salvadoran government launched "Pacific Airport Project", an international public offering to foreign companies to study the design of the airport. In total, 44 companies showed interest in the project and 11 of those presented economic models to the Salvadoran government. On 24 February 2022, the government was given an economic and financial report by Peyco-ALBEN 4000 Consortium, an air transportation company. The report estimated that the airport would create 4,700 new jobs in its first year of operation. The plan estimated that in the first ten years of operation, the airport would accommodate 1 to 3 million passengers and around 18,000 aircraft movements. Federico Anliker, the president of the Autonomous Port Executive Commission (CEPA) separately estimated that the airport's construction would create over 23,700 new jobs. In March 2022, CEPA confirmed that the airport would be located in the Condadillo caserío of Conchagua, a district of the La Unión department just south of the city of La Unión and the planned Bitcoin City. The residents of Condadillo and the nearby caserío of Flor de Mangle would be relocated due to the airport's construction. The location has an elevation of 56 feet (17 m).

On 25 April 2022, the Legislative Assembly's Economic Commission approved a law for the construction of the airport. The following day the full Legislative Assembly approved the law, titled "Law for the Construction, Administration, Operation, and Maintenance of the Airport of the Pacific", with 67 of the 84 votes to officially authorize the construction of the airport. According to the Legislative Assembly, nine locations were considered; six were eliminated due to the perceived difficulty that landing airplanes would face and the Legislative Assembly settled on the selected site to minimize effects on the environment.

Airport data from the OpenFlights open database.