In few areas of Spain does the concept of Euroregion work, such as between the south of the province of Pontevedra and the north of Portugal. The international bridges that link them host almost half of the traffic between the two countries along the entire border, from the mouth of the Miño to Ayamonte (Huelva), and thousands of residents cross the river every day to go to work. The closure of most of the border crossings decreed by the Portuguese authorities, due to the incidence of covid, and the controls in which they have remained open have sown chaos like the one that was already experienced in the confinement of March. The workers are the main affected, trapped in a viaduct, the Tui-Valença, which has become a real funnel.
The closure was decreed by Portugal, where the coronavirus advances without control. Since the dawn of this Sunday, they only remain open three steps across the border from Portugal with Galicia: Tui-Valença Y Salvaterra-Monçao, both in the province of Pontevedra, and Verín-Chaves, in Ourense. In addition, Salvaterra operates with time limitations, from 8:00 to 10:00 and from 19:00 to 21:00. This means that the bulk of cross-border traffic, especially intense in the early and late morning, is channeled through Tui, where the police of the two countries have established checkpoints to verify that trips are made for authorized reasons. , which are mainly work or to visit spouses or partners. Thus, retentions are added to the mandatory detours, and 20-minute journeys last two and up to three hours.
Lola Sánchez. Lisbon
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“A one-off retention is a displeasure, but when it becomes daily, it can make your life bitter”Says a Galician woman from Tomiño (Pontevedra) who works in a factory in Valença and who has already experienced the end of March with anguish. In her case, in addition, the trips are made by public transport, which exposes her to buses that are canceled without notice you already wait endless. Renfe, meanwhile, has suspended all its services between Vigo and Porto, which had recovered on August 16.
“Back to the worst moment of 2020”
Organisms such as European Grouping for Territorial Cooperation (EGTC) of the Galicia-Northern Portugal Euroregion, in which the Xunta and entities of the neighboring country participate, have requested that the peculiarities of the area are taken into account and the maximum possible steps are kept open to cushion the effects of the closure. As they explained in a statement, it is about “limiting as much as possible the negative impact” of the border closure for the economy, but also for the daily life of the population, which suffered very hard from the restrictions of last spring. The closure decreed by Portugal will mean “returning to the worst moment” of 2020, they denounce.
The pandemic hits Portugal during the month of January
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Too mayors are concerned and they begin to mobilize. This Monday, they met to take action and conveyed their “discomfort” to the Government delegate, Javier Losada. The meeting took place in the context of the EGTC -European instrument for cooperation- Río Miño. Your deputy director, Uxío Benítez, requested on behalf of the affected municipalities the opening of all closed crossings to avoid situations like this Monday, with long queues and waits of more than several hours, as well as the activation of a cross-border card to streamline controls. Losada promised to forward their requests to the Foreign Ministry. The mayors of the EGTC do not rule out protests at a closure that forces workers to make kilometer detours to go to their jobs.
The controls this Monday, the first working day of the new closure, focused mainly on the Portuguese side, where, according to the deputy director of the EGTC Río Miño, GNR agents carried out an exhaustive review of all the documentation presented by the people who intended to cross and rejected some of the supporting documents, which caused a large plug, similar to those that were repeated daily in the previous closure. The group considers that an offense has been caused in the passage through the province of Pontevedra, since, despite representing only 5% of the length of the border, it concentrates almost 50% of the total traffic between the two countries. “It is not comparable to those of Castilla y León, Andalusia or Extremadura, communities that have been granted the same number of steps as all of Galicia”, denounces Benítez.
The mayor of Salvaterra has also expressed her disagreement with the restricted opening hours of the bridge with Monçao, although there were hardly any retentions in that position and there have been few vehicles that were prevented from passing for failing to comply with the requirements to cross. In the third open viaduct, between Verín and Chaves, in an area much less populated than the border in the province of Pontevedra, traffic also ran normally on the first business day of the new restrictions. In Tui, by contrast, the queues trapped not only displaced workers, but also hundreds of trucks.
Inspection of almost 1,900 vehicles
According to data from the Government Delegation, only on Monday morning, the Civil Guard and the National Police inspected the drivers of 1,182 vehicles from Portugal, although only 11 were detained for not being able to justify their trip. According to the new measures applied since the early hours of Sunday, only entry into Spanish territory will be allowed of Spanish citizens and their spouses or partners, of residents in Spain and of residents in other Member States or Schengen associates who go to their duly accredited place of habitual residence. Also those who are going to transit or remain in Spanish territory for any exclusively labor reason, including cross-border, health and transport workers. The transit of those people who document reasons of force majeure or situation of need, among others, is also admitted.
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