Yes it was.
El Sueño was the brainchild of Ed Ringle, the mogul of Beatty, a town of around 900 people 115 miles northwest of Las Vegas and one of the gateways to Death Valley National Park.
Ringle, 57, has lived and worked in Beatty for nearly 30 years and is the town’s largest employer. He owns Beatty’s only casino, the Stagecoach on the north side of town, having bought and closed his two casino competitors over the years.
After buying the Burro Inn on the south side of Beatty, he demolished the casino, spruced up the 65 motel rooms, and renamed the place Death Valley Inn.
Ringle also purchased the historic Exchange Club at Beatty’s main intersection, replaced the casino with a hardware store, and kept the 44 hotel rooms.
Then he built a 69-room Motel 6 next to the Stagecoach (Ringle has a contractor’s license). He also opened Eddie World, a combination Chevron station, minimart, maxi candy store, and Subway sandwich shop.
The Stagecoach has a couple hundred slots, five tables, a sports bar, and a Denny’s.
Ringle’s plan for El Sueño ("The Dream" in Spanish) was grandiose even by the standards of Las Vegas, which is roughly 2,500 times larger than Beatty. Reportedly, he spent eight years buying up 27 acres of land and water rights for 175 acres more, to build the "first fully themed Spanish-speaking hotel-casino that caters to the family market."
The resort was planned to consist of a 500-room high-rise hotel tower, a 30,000-square-foot casino, several Latin American-inspired restaurants, a 76,000-square-foot indoor-outdoor water park, a master-planned housing community called Oasis Valley, and a greenbelt and walking trails around the springs that form the headwaters of the Amargosa River, which runs mostly underground through Oasis Valley and the Beatty, in order to help preserve some of the area's foliage and wildlife.
Ringle built the sign, erected a small fence along the highway, and actually opened a sales office in Costa Rica, but that’s as far as he got. The sign and fence are still there, nearly eight years later.
Ringle has donated some of his land along the river to the Nature Conservancy, which plans to preserve the Amargosa toad and the Oasis Valley speckled dace, plus remove the invasive salt cedar trees.
