It is enough to get to the tourism office of Onil (Alcoià) to understand the importance that the famous Playmobil clicks have in the Alicante town. One of these figures, life-size, with the perpetual smile characteristic of his family, invites the visitor to enter the elegant building that houses the main attraction of the town: the Museu de la Nina.
Onil was the home of Famosa until in 2012 the company moved the factory to Alicante. Today the old factory is empty, barely a hundred meters from this impressive dollhouse that hundreds of students visit. It is forbidden to touch anything, much to the suffering of the monitors, who have to control the children’s impulses in the large Playmobil room, a fantasy of castles, ships, farms… With Famosa, Playmobil arrived in Onil in 1976. Since some months, in front of the large white building that for almost 50 years manufactured the rigid dolls, only the watchman parks there. The company, whose head office is in Zirndorf (Germany), made an ERO of 26 people at the Spanish plant in September 2023.
In April, Playmobil carried out another ERO of 13 people, so there are currently 20 workers left, as the sales and marketing department and the logistics division of the Iberian Peninsula will continue here.
However, the toy valley is far from suffering an industrial decline. In fact, the one that was the cradle of products as characteristic as Nancy has a high demand for industrial land and qualified personnel to work in “the big factory”, as announced by the slogan that can be seen from the highway when you reach the huge industrial estate of Ibi. Sergio Carrasco has been the mayor since the summer of 2023, but he has been a councilor since 2015 and knows well the needs of the town, where the toy is still very important, but which is no longer dependent on the sector that suffered in previous crises.
Although around twenty toymakers survive, some with as much renown as Moltó and Guisval, the reconversion that local industrialists knew how to carry out towards the plastic and packaging industry, taking advantage of the know-how accumulated over decades of manufacturing foremost, it has reduced the share of the toy in the manufacturing sector to 10%.
“Ibi is an eminently industrial municipality”, explains the mayor to La Vanguardia, “but we have not generated industrial land for twenty years; this is the main problem”. There are more than 550 companies that fill the Ibi polygon, some of them as powerful as Smurfit Kappa, a packaging multinational that recently announced an investment of 54 million euros to expand its factory.
The City Council is looking for formulas to unlock an expansion of one million square meters of land, pending the resolution of administrative problems that have kept it paralyzed. “It’s essential”, Carrasco points out, “because it’s not just that Ibi is industrial, it’s that we are at the forefront of the sector: almost everything that is used in daily life is wholly or partially manufactured in one of our companies , thanks to the diversification we have achieved”. This does not mean that the toy is gone. “It is present with factories even more historic than Playmobil; the claims that the toy valley is dying are completely false”.
The mayor points out that world-renowned firms such as Moltó, Injusa and Miniland continue to produce. Carrasco differentiates the impact that Playmobil’s decision has today from the crisis of the eighties, “when 90% of the companies worked for the toy”. Then, “Iberut knew how to reinvent itself, as it has always done”. And he mentions an example: “The company Pepris, which started with toys, is now making the sides of hospital beds”. This general reinvention has meant that today “we have two million square meters of industrial land working at 200%”, to the point that “some companies have had to divide the activity and move part of it to neighboring towns”. Today, the manufacture of toys represents 11% of turnover in the region. But in its history it maintains a weight that is difficult to measure, although undoubtedly greater. And it opens a timidly explored path: that of tourism.
Ibi has a small but fascinating Toy Museum that already receives many visitors, like the Onil Doll Museum. “Ibi, apart from being the big factory, is the house where dreams live”, explains the mayor. “We have the project to create the house of the Kings of the Orient, we have themed parks; of Pocoyó, of the dragon, an Arcade museum…”, he adds. And their plans include collaboration with Onil, Tibi, Castalla, the municipalities that make up the game valley, to jointly develop the obvious tourist potential of this common brand.
