(FORTUNE Magazine) – ANY SPANIARD still wondering why Walt Disney Co. suddenly switched the site for its new Euro Disneyland theme park from Spain's balmy Mediterranean coast to a featureless sugar-beet field 20 miles east of Paris should take a close look at the French deal. Terms are just beginning to emerge as the parties hammer out a final agreement due in June. Eager for the 30,000 jobs the project is expected to provide, plus an estimated $300 million a year in foreign exchange from tourists, France threw in lavish incentives, from tax breaks to a new mass transit line. But the real payoff is in the real estate. Over the bitter protests of local farmers, the government plans to use its right of eminent domain to sell Disney and its partners a 4,400-acre site at a fraction of market value. The parcel of prime suburban real estate is in a mushrooming region called Marne-la-Vallee. Commuter trains will whisk visitors from central Paris to the park in just 30 minutes, while a network of six-lane highways links the site to Brussels, Frankfurt, and nearby Charles de Gaulle Airport. France is studying a proposal to build a new line of its 156-mile-per-hour train a grande vitesse (TGV) to southern Germany -- with a stop at Euro Disneyland. ''This is the best undeveloped site in Europe,'' exclaims Patrice Bourrut- Lacouture, an executive with Bouygues, a French construction company. Says Richard Nunis, president of Disney's parks division: ''We couldn't have designed this site any better.'' Disney will have a number of partners, many of them French. When the final agreement is signed, Disney will form a holding company to control development of the entire site. Disney and its partners will put up $250 million for shares in the holding company and borrow another $750 million, including $400 million from the French government at favorable terms. Disney plans to own 17% of the stock and will find French companies to buy 50% of the shares and U.S. and European companies to purchase the remaining 33%. French companies are eager to sign up. Companies outside France that are enthusiastic about investing include Eastman Kodak of the U.S. and Nestle of Switzerland. The holding company will own the park, but Disney will manage it and collect an estimated $35 million a year in royalties on sales of tickets, food, and souvenirs. Disney's plans for the site over the next 20 years call for 15,000 hotel rooms, about one-fourth the number in the city of Paris, and as much as six million square feet of offices, about two-thirds of the space in the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center. It also plans 7,000 luxury apartments clustered around artificial lakes. Disney says that rather than selling off building plots, the holding company will develop, codevelop, or lease most of the land. ''At Euro Disneyland we're looking to long-term values,'' says Gary Wilson, Disney's chief financial officer. The French government has agreed to cut the value-added tax on ticket sales to just 7% instead of the usual 18.5%. State and regional governments will pay about $125 million to extend the mass transit line six miles to the site and another $105 million to build highways to the project, construct Euro Disneyland's main roadway, and install infrastructure including sewer and telephone trunk lines. A regional development agency will acquire the land from individual holders and sell it to the holding company. The price could be as little as $100,000 an acre. At Cite Descartes, an office and industrial park in another part of Marne-la-Vallee, developers are paying about $750,000 an acre. The French government is also granting the Disney group the right of first refusal on the sale of about 10,000 acres surrounding the Euro Disneyland site. Still, it will take shrewd marketing to make the real estate project a winner. The big challenge will be luring customers to soak up the huge allotment of office space at Euro Disneyland. Disney will have stiff competition from other office projects on still abundant land closer to Paris. Though Euro Disneyland will be the first Disney park to provide offices, Disney has had plenty of experience building low-density, lushly landscaped office parks through its Florida real estate subsidiary, Arvida. Bucolic office parks, a rarity in France, could catch on at Euro Disneyland with companies looking for big lots that leave room for future expansion. The magic Disney name will be a draw. For hotel chains, developers, and companies flocking to Paris over the next two decades, chez Disney could be the place to be.