PARIS: The Eiffel Tower, France’s most popular paid tourist attraction, has decided to take up the technological challenge of its 120 years of existence by digging deep into the ground to give itself an additional two floors. The Tower says that it is desperately in need of space, in part to handle an important influx of visitors, notably from Asia and Eastern Europe.

After months of hard bargaining and waiting, the authorities who manage the tower - which is owned by a para-private company, the SNTE (Societe nouvelle d’exploitation de la tour Eiffel), itself controlled by French banking group Credit foncier de France) - have persuaded the City of Paris, which has a 30 per cent stake in SNTE and manages the structure, and the new Mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoe, to authorize them to construct two additional levels.

And, as the 324-meter edifice can no longer grow any taller, the Eiffel Tower is planning to expand downwards into the Paris subsoil that adjoins the Seine River in the fifteenth arrondissement where it was built between 1887 and 1889.

According to a plan that has just received the go-ahead of Paris Mayor Delanoe, the Eiffel Tower, which is France’s most-visited paid monument with 6.5 million visitors last year, will dig deep into the ground to create a 10,000 square metre two-storey structure that will house a congress centre, restaurants, and a museum devoted to the Tower itself.

Jean-Bernard Bros the new president of the Societe nouvelle d’exploitation de la Tour Eiffel (SNTE), the organism that operates the Eiffel Tower, says that the time has come to give the Tower the means to expand and deal with an ever-increasing number of visitors. And, he says the time has come too for the SNTE to undertake a “formidable engineering challenge,” undoubtedly a challenge as formidable as that of building the tower in the first place. Construction of the new underground structure should take three years, but may take a bit longer, says Bros, notably because of the fragile nature of the Paris subsoil that has been largely quarried and mined over the past several centuries.

Then too, says Bros, the Eiffel Tower sits practically atop the Seine River, which may pose additional obstacles to construction. Especially as the two additional levels will add extra weight to a structure that is already estimated to weigh in at 10,000 tons.