Spain has offered a financial package worth up to €1 billion to bring the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) to La Palma in the Canary Islands, the project's official alternate site — the strongest push yet to relocate the giant observatory from its long-disputed home on Hawaii's Mauna Kea.

Announced on 29 July, the framework combines a €400 million contribution from Spain's Ministry of Science through the CDTI development agency — matching its initial offer from July 2025 — with a €300 million loan from the European Investment Bank, subject to final assessments, and up to €300 million that the state-owned bank ICO said it was 'considering'. The package is contingent on the TMT consortium moving the project from Hawaii to La Palma.

Mauna Kea has been the preferred site since 2009, but construction has been blocked for more than a decade by protests over the mountain's sacred status to Native Hawaiians, court proceedings and blockades. Funding has also faltered: the US National Science Foundation declined to advance TMT to final design in its FY2026 budget request, instead proposing the Giant Magellan Telescope in Chile, and repeated that preference in its FY2027 request, with no design funding for TMT.

The €1 billion proposal caps nearly a year of Spanish efforts: Madrid first offered €400 million in July 2025, and by November the TMT consortium called the Spanish offer 'a promising avenue for a new observatory' and agreed to develop a roadmap for realizing TMT on La Palma. If built, the Thirty Meter Telescope would be one of the largest optical-infrared observatories ever planned, joining the growing cluster of world-class facilities on La Palma's Roque de los Muchachos Observatory.

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