Warsaw turns on the charm as Miss World hits town

WARSAW, Sep 30 (Reuters) Warsaw, not always a top tourist destination, is determined to show off its charms to a huge television audience when it hosts the Miss World beauty contest today.

''Warsaw is the capital of beauty this week,'' Warsaw Mayor Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz said at a reception with the 104 Miss World contestants at the Chinese embassy.

Poland is the first of East Europe's former communist countries to host Miss World and, in keeping with its conversion to capitalism, is aiming to cash in on the exposure.

A Polish think tank calculated the pageant, billed as television's most watched event, will help draw five million extra tourists to Poland by 2010, creating 20,000 jobs and boosting Poland's economic output by one percent over the next four years.

City officials hope many of those tourists will stop in Warsaw, which was mostly destroyed in World War Two and is shunned by many visitors who flock to eastern European tourist magnets like Czech capital Prague and Krakow in southern Poland.

''We want to show the world Warsaw is a city of opportunity, a city with big events for all kinds of people,'' said Tadeusz Deszkiewicz, head of Warsaw's promotional department.

Deszkiewicz, who has met most of the contestants, said he was backing Brazil's Jane Sousa Borges Oliviera, a brunette who once studied to be a nun.

''She's powerful, nice, pretty,'' Deszkiewicz said. ''She's a very good representative.

The two-hour show will be held in Warsaw's Palace of Culture, a skyscraper built by the Soviet Union as a gift to Poland and regarded by many Warsaw residents as a Stalinist eyesore.

Odds-on favourite is Czech Republic's Tatana Kucharova, a willowy 18-year-old high school student who wants to be a model, according to Internet gambling Web sites.

Feminists dismiss the pageant as a sexist ''cattle show'' demeaning to women, yet Miss World, founded by a British businessman in 1951, remains popular. More than two billion people in 200 countries will watch the show, which starts at 2330 hrs IST, organisers said.

This year, fans casting ballots through mobile phones and the Internet will choose eight of 16 finalists. Winners of sports, swimsuit, talent and best charitable work competitions will also get automatic berths.

Reigning Miss World is Iceland's Unnur Birna Vilhjalmsdottir. She won the title in December in the southern Chinese resort Island of Hainan.

Reuters AD VP0425