Of every five kilometers of Spanish peninsular coast, one is in Galicia. With a quick look at the map, this proportion can be shocking, since the surface of the Galician territory represents little more than 5% of that of Spain. A closer look reveals, for example, that the mouth of the Ferrol estuary, between the castles of San Felipe and A Palma, has a minimum width of 160 metres, while from there it is 14 kilometers by car to reach the edge of the estuary, inland. This example explains the immensity of the Galician coastline compared to its size.
After 40 years of autonomy, this entire complex and differential universe is managed from the Spanish capital. Given the future restrictions of the Government in terms of costs, Galicia requests the transfer. Madrid replies that for this it must reform its Statute. The Xunta replies brandishing the sentence of the Constitutional Court on the Statute of Catalonia.
The map of the Peninsula, in its entirety, or without Portugal as in those of television time, holds more oceanic surprises. Despite its location inland, dry land, the town of Madrid has a seafaring dimension. Until the early 1990s, it housed the only Naval Engineering School in Spain and the only hydrodynamic testing channel.
The public shipyard company, Navantia, has its headquarters in the capital of Spain, whose main factory is located in the Ferrol estuary. The same happens with Cepesca, the Spanish Fisheries Confederation, in Madrid, despite the Galician pre-eminence in the sector, recognized by the European Union with the location in Vigo of the European Fisheries Control Agency.
From the capital, the entire Spanish coast is managed directly, except for those of Catalonia and Andalusia, while in the Balearic and Canary Islands the transfer is negotiated.
“We do not want Madrid to decide on our coastline. And nobody is going to better defend our coast and its people than the Galician Government”. This phrase, pronounced in the gallery of the Galician Parliament on June 14, is not the work of a representative of the BNG, but of a deputy of the PP of Galicia, Begoña Freire. His roundness led the nationalist Xosé Luís Bará to urge him to join the Bloc, although he specified that the striking proclamation is framed, in his opinion, in the exchange of positions of popular and socialists depending on who governs in Madrid.
In that session, with uncommon unanimity on essential issues, the Galician Parliament demanded the urgent call of the mixed Transfer Commission to negotiate the transfer of the Atlantic motorway (AP-9), a whole soap opera that has been dragging on for decades , as well as the management of the maritime-terrestrial public domain.
This last question is one of the priorities that the new president of the Xunta, Alfonso Rueda, wants to present to the president of the Government, Pedro Sánchez. He will do it, according to sources from the Xunta, with an argument that includes the sentence of the Statute.
It accepts the extension of the powers of the Generalitat in matters of costs, because it already had exclusive jurisdiction in the matter. And the same thing happened with the reformed Andalusian Statute. As Galicia also has this exclusive jurisdiction, the legal services of the Xunta affirm that the transfer is feasible without modifying the Statute, as required by the central government. In the Galician Parliament, the PSOE agrees with BNG and PP that it is not necessary to do so.
The litigation has its origin in the elaboration of the National Strategic Plan for the Protection of the Coast. According to the Xunta, it puts 4,000 homes, 232 companies and 59 of the 65 Galician fish markets at risk, as well as educational and sports facilities.
Galicia has not received a single transfer since 2008, which coincides with the entire period of Alberto Núñez Feijóo in the Xunta. It was also he who, without any political cost, blocked the threat of statutory reform in 2007, which was never approved. That is why Galicia is the only community that has not even tried it, because in Euskadi there was the Ibarretxe plan. Now BNG and PSOE are still willing, while Rueda affirms that it is not a priority. Two thirds of Parliament are needed to approve this reform, which is unfeasible right now. Madrid, fishing village.
