"We would be late even if it were done tomorrow," Carlos Mazón, president of the Generalitat Valenciana, said yesterday about the expansion of the Valencia airport. His sentence already shows the "urgency", which he himself highlighted later, in undertaking a transformation that since The business sector has been demanding it for a long time. It also gives an idea of what the political conflict will be in the coming months, because for the Generalitat Valenciana the need for Manises, like that of El Altet in Alicante, is “at the same level as the Mediterranean corridor. or the expansion of the port of Valencia,” Mazón noted.
The president attended yesterday the presentation of the report that the Council of Chambers of the Valencian Community has prepared on the expansion of the Manises airport, which shows that the opportunity cost of not expanding it already implies that the city and its province leave to enter, in an optimistic scenario, up to 1,780 million euros per year.
The study analyzes the evolution of passenger traffic at the airport over the last decade and points out how all forecasts made by official reports have been exceeded in accordance with current facilities, approaching saturation levels. The airport's capacity is 10.5 million passengers and in 2023 the total volume was 9.9 million.
Other figures from the report add that, in an optimistic scenario, the provincial GDP at risk would be valued at 1,540 million euros and there would be a total of 28,860 jobs per year that would not be generated either.
That is why Mazón asked for an “equally serious response from those who have the powers and at least with the same seriousness that we proposed this morning”, endorsing the Council's report, because, as he highlighted, “when we are going to demand something, we must rigorously claim.”
They will do so on May 9, when the Ministers of the Environment, Salomé Pradas, and Innovation, Nuria Montes, meet with the management of AENA in Madrid, an appointment that comes days after its president and CEO, Maurici Lucena, announced that the airport manager will “expand” the Valencia and Alicante-Elche airports, although he set a date: within the 2027-2031 framework.
The councilors will take yesterday's report to Madrid, to which will be added the one that was presented the day before in Alicante, in this case on the need for a second runway at the El Altet airfield.
And the urgency, argues the Consell, is almost as much as that of Valencia. Because in Alicante, 2023 closed with figures that place it as the best year in its history: 15,747,678 registered passengers and an increase of 19.2% compared to the annual balance of 2022. It thus far exceeds its previous best number of travelers, 15,048,240, recorded in 2019. And the data for the first three months of 2024 have once again reported successive records, which, given the forecasts for the high season, could lead the aerodrome to exceed 16 million travelers this year. Laura Navarro, director of the Alicante airport, announced in the recent presentation of the new easyJet base in Alicante that the forecast for places between April and October is 13% higher than last year.
As things stand, the political debate is on the table. On the one hand, the PP and the entire business community are putting pressure on the data to demand a calendar from a ministry that is striving to show that it is up to the task. On the other hand, Compromís, in agreement with environmental organizations and other leftist groups, recalls that the preservation of the Aguamarga salt marshes advises against the project, considers that the figures do not justify the rush and reiterates its rejection of a tourism model that, in its trial, it is not sustainable.
