Andalusia wants high-speed Seville-Faro train link
According to the regional official, both the Andalusian and the Portuguese governments "have expressed interest" in continuing the Madrid-Seville high-speed rail link to Faro via Huelva.
The regional government of Andalusia wants to discuss the extension of the Madrid-Seville high-speed train to Huelva and Faro in the Algarve in the work of next week’s Luso-Spanish Summit.
The Andalusian regional minister for Development, Infrastructure and Spatial Planning, Marifrán Carazo, told Lusa on Wednesday today that the project “is strategic for Andalusia and the Algarve”, with the need to start its economic feasibility study to take advantage of European funds.
“Europe is betting heavily on railways and cross-border projects, and we have to take advantage of this unique opportunity,” Carazo said.
According to the regional official, both the Andalusian and the Portuguese governments “have expressed interest” in continuing the Madrid-Seville high-speed rail link to Faro via Huelva, “but the Spanish government has so far not expressed an opinion”.
“It is a cross-border project that has to be considered by the summit that will bring together the prime ministers of Portugal and Spain, accompanied by their ministers, in Trujillo (Spanish Extremadura) on 28 October, Carazo said.
The regional minister said that it is first necessary to study the economic viability of the investment to be made and then “work quickly to convince Europe of its importance”.
Carazo told Lusa that the Spanish government should “make the most of the possibility offered by the ‘Next Generation’ European funds” to “invest in railways”, both in the cross-border project and in the Huelva-Sevilla conventional railway line.
The EU’s Next Generation constitutes a central piece of the European Union’s response to the crisis caused by covid-19, and its sum (€750 billion) will be distributed to the member states in two ways: €390 billion in the form of grants (outright transfers) and €360 billion in the form of loans.
The Luso-Spanish Summits bring together members of the two governments annually and alternately in one of the two countries. The last meeting took place on October 10 last year in Guarda, Portugal.
