The Portuguese government put out to tender on Wednesday, in the middle of the electoral campaign in Galicia and in the Portuguese pre-campaign - the general elections will be held there on March 10 - the study for a new section of the Lisbon-Oporto-Vigo railway line.
Politics, geography and trains come together in this simple procedure. For some time now, the Portuguese socialist government opted to give priority to the high-capacity railway line that will link its two large cities, Lisbon and Porto, and Vigo, which will be the bridgehead of the network in Spain to the north. A route that breaks the peninsular radial railway system in which everything, or almost everything, passes through Madrid.
The socialist Pedro Nuno Santos, former Minister of Infrastructure and today candidate for Prime Minister to replace Antonio Costa, is the main supporter of this proposal.
Portugal had another option: instead of putting the bulldozers to work northward, they could have directed them eastward. Link Lisbon with Madrid through Extremadura. In fact, that was the bet of the Social Democratic Party, the Portuguese conservatives and, specifically, the mayor of Lisbon, Carlos Moedas. And it was also true of the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, that she has defended giving priority to that connection that would draw a new peninsular horizontal line: the Lisbon-Madrid-Valencia axis. A new corridor of prosperity with the capital of Spain in the center.
But the old Lustania Express - which once covered the Lisbon-Madrid line at night - will have to wait and, for once in its life, it will be the Celta train, which even now runs twice a day and very tiresomely the distance between Vigo and Porto, whoever has priority.
All the parties involved in the Galician campaign applaud the commitment of their neighbors, including the Popular Party. Its candidate and current president of the Xunta, Alfonso Rueda, defended this connection in a recent meeting with businessmen in the middle of the pre-campaign and warned that if the Madrid president claims to give priority to the link between Madrid and Lisbon over that of Vigo, they would face each other. It is not a joke to challenge the president of the Community.
The spokesperson for the Department of Infrastructure and Mobility of the Xunta ratifies this position without any ambiguity. But, from there the reproaches begin because, the truth is that, on the Spanish side, little or nothing has been done to one day see that connection become a reality. In fact, the connection through Extremadura is much more advanced on the Spanish side.
While the Xunta accuses the Ministry of Public Works of lacking the “determination” of its Portuguese colleagues, the Socialist Party of Galicia maintains that the current Galician president has not lifted a finger to advance the connection.
“At the rate we are going, it will be impossible to reach 2030,” concludes Luis Bará, spokesperson for the Galician Nationalist Bloc on this matter, who highlights the fact that within the Ministry of Mobility “there is not even one department dedicated to the railway sector.”
There is some truth in the nationalists' criticism. Let's look back: in Catalonia, the first route of the high-speed network - in fact it was the first planned in Spain although Madrid-Seville was later passed ahead - was planned between Barcelona and the French border and was done by Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat . In fact, the Ministry of Public Works ended up adopting this Catalan study to build the line on which trains already run today.
The case of Euskadi is similar. The so-called Greek Basque, which will link all its capitals with the French border, has been designed and is being built by the Basque Government with funds from the European Union and the Spanish Government.
The problem for the Basques is that the French do not seem to have much interest in improving their network to connect with the route built in Esukadi.
In the cross-border connection between Portugal and Spain, through Galicia, the same thing could happen, in reverse, if no one stands firm.
Maybe they have their reasons for not doing it. The study awarded last Wednesday affects the connection between the city of Braga and the Porto airport. This terminal is, in fact, the international airport of Galicia. When Galicians want to fly away they go to Porto, they don't go to Madrid. But now they have to go by car, by train, it is almost impossible. Despite these difficulties, Porto's Sa Carneiro terminal registered 15 million passengers this last year. Peinador, in Vigo, two million.
Reality is stubborn. The geography professor at the University of Santiago, Miguel Pazos-Otón, maintains that the entire Atlantic front of the peninsula, from A Coruña to Lisbon, constitutes a single urban region in which the border between Portugal and Galicia blurs every day with the traffic of thousands of people who work on one side and live on the other. “I have supervised five doctoral theses, three of them were by Portuguese students,” summarizes this geographer, a firm defender of the fact that one day the connection between Vigo and Braga, Bragança, Viana or even Oporto will have the dimension of a Cercanías service.
In Galicia there is no Cercanías service today.
