Pedro Nuno Santos challenges Spain to “wind up their shoes” on the high-speed train that will connect Lisbon to Galicia
The Infrastructure Minister of Infrastructure, Pedro Nuno Santos, challenges “Friday or rope to the shoes” so that the less escalated structure at high speed to the Government between the two countries, structure at high speed to the Government between the two countries.
“The challenge that I launched here is for Spain to wind up its shoes so that there is no risk of us arriving with a line at the border and not having anything on the other side,” said the minister.
Pedro Nuno Santos, who spoke to journalists after ending Melgaço, the conference “Challenges of Cross-Border Cooperation, Connectivity and Territorial Accessibility: What is the positioning of the Alto Minho territory?”, guaranteed that it was not “a criticism”, but “a challenge ”.
“I am hopeful that the Portuguese Governments will be able to understand each other and, in good time, carry out this construction of construction. We are doing this work with the Spanish Government and the work has always been excellent, it has gone well and will continue to do so. It is a great common goal”, affirming the new high-speed connection between Lisbon and Galicia.
Speech at the conference by the Intermunicipal Community, which involved the first European meeting of Jesus Gamallo, Director General of External Reactions with the Union of the Junta de Galicia, Pedro Nuno Santos assured the official.
“I’m pretty sure we’re going to get to the border first, but we don’t want to get to the border first with a train that can go 300 kilometers an hour and stop there. Valença will always win because there are 50 minutes from Porto and just over two minutes from Lisbon,” he said.
He highlighted that the Government “has a great relationship” with Galicia, a region “with which it is possible to work well, and if there is a lot that does not progress it is not because of Galicia, Vigo, or other cities in Galicia”. “It’s a little more towards the center of the Iberian Peninsula”, he said.
“We made a highway to Quintanilha, on the border of Trás-os-Montes, and what was agreed was that there would be a highway from Quintanilha to Zamora. The situation is that they advance, a motorway is a national road and, for the Portuguese, it is a national road”, referring that this road will follow the fifth after several governments.
The minister assured that for the Government “the priority is the new connection that will connect Lisbon to Galicia”, to speak for the “soon” presentation of the project calendar.
“We’ll start in the south, but we also want to go north, between Braga Vigo (Galicia) and Braga and Porto. We will build the connection from Porto to the south, to Lisbon. The northern part is more difficult from Braga to the north than from Braga to Porto. Therefore, we will start on this section, but obviously the objective is to make Porto, Sá Carneiro airport, from there to Braga and from Braga to Vigo”, he specified.
He added that, “if in the past, the obsession was the connection between Lisbon and Madrid”, the “obsession” of this Government, “is connecting Lisbon to Porto and Porto to Vigo.
“This is absolutely neat. It’s our priority because the Spanish region with which the greatest economic, social and cultural relationship is with Galicia, and that’s where we have to go first. Tomorrow, if we have more money, we will try to make a connection there to Madrid”.
New Atlantic rail corridor
For Pedro Nuno Santos “there is no hesitation because the railway is a means of transport for the future, in which the whole of Europe is investing”.
In October, at the presentation of the National Investment Program (PNI) 2030, the Minister of Infrastructure said that the goals for the central railway are, among others, the creation of a new Porto-Vigo (Spain) line with a duration of one hour, as well as grid electrification by 2030.
The president of the Junta de Galicia, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, revealed that the new line that will connect those two represents an investment for Portugal of 900 million euros, and 578 million euros on the Spanish side, for a total of 21 kilometers.
The new Atlântico rail corridor depends on the construction of a new Lisbon-Porto line, and a connection between Porto and Vigo, in a total investment of 5.4 billion ten million euros over the next few years. The new sections will be built in Iberian gauge, but will have multipurpose sleepers for an eventual change to the European standard.