Discontent in the tourist sector of Lleida due to the entry into operation of the route between the Andorra-La Seu d'Urgell airport and Palma de Mallorca financed by the Government of Andorra. The flights began this Friday, in the form of a pilot project, and will continue until the end of March.
“The problem is that this airport is serving Andorra more than the Lleida Pyrenees. The Generalitat does not build any other infrastructure in the rest of the Pyrenees and maintains an infrastructure to bring clients to Andorra, which is our competence,” said this Saturday the mayor of Vielha and vice president of the Patronat de Turisme de les Terres de Lleida, Juan Antonio Serrano. .
“It's scandalous and someone will have to say it. Or do we all applaud like idiots?”, asks the mayor of Unitat d’Aran, the Aranese socialist party, rhetorically.
Serrano believes that the first thing the Generalitat has to do “is close the airport or not allow flights financed by another country.” The second thing he says is “to build infrastructure in the rest of the Pyrenees.”
He insists that this situation seems like a scandal to him: “And the fact that no one says anything is even more scandalous.” In this context, he affirms that with Catalans' money things are done for another country and rhetorically he also wonders if France would have done it.
With this argument he considers that “once again it is shown that Catalonia doesn't give a damn about the Lleida Pyrenees. Andorra is more important than the Pyrenees of Lleida.”
For her part, the president of the Federation of Rural Tourism Houses, Núria Ferrando, considers, in her personal capacity, that the route is designed to bring large numbers of tourists to the slopes, so rural tourism does not benefit.
On Friday, Air Nostrum inaugurated the route between Andorra-La Seu d'Urgell airport and Palma de Mallorca with round-trip flights on Fridays and Sundays. An ATR-72 plane, with 41 passengers, left Mallorca at nine in the morning and landed in La Seu at ten. Afterwards he returned to Son Sant Joan with 17 people.
The Andorran government finances this new route that is added to the regular route between Andorra-La Seu and Madrid, which the same company has offered for two years and which also operates on Fridays and Sundays.
In this time, the Seu d'Urgell airport has received more than 19,000 passengers, including users of the Air Nostrum route and corporate aviation.
On Friday, after receiving the first travelers on the route, the Minister of Territory, Ester Capella stated that “the Andorra-La Seu airport is a strategic infrastructure at the service of the Pyrenees, which guarantees basic services, better accessibility of this part of the country and also the competitiveness of the companies and the tourist attraction.”
For his part, the Minister of Tourism and Commerce of Andorra, Jordi Torres, recalled that the new route is a milestone that has been reached after an extensive journey at the Pyrenean airport. “With the aim of continuing to grow, we started this link with the Balearic Islands, a market very interested in visiting us and with which we hope to have a successful connection,” he stressed.
