On November 9, there was a trip that the Principality President Adrián Barbón described as “historic”. Considering its duration (20 minutes) and distance (50 kilometers) alone, it doesn’t seem like a great success. But it was the first route of the High Speed railway in Variante de Pajares between La Robla (León) and the town of Campomanes in Lén. For over 40 years, it’s a vacuum that has spawned dashed hopes, raucous headlines, logistical conundrums, technical disasters, budget jumps, and most of all, a lot of political controversy. A gap that complicates communication between Asturias and the rest of Spain (especially Madrid), which has a negative impact on attracting investment, retaining professionals and transporting goods. On his maiden voyage last month, Barbón assured that this distance of 50 kilometers per hour at 160 speeds under the Cantabrian mountain range meant the “end of isolation” of the region.
In fact, that first voyage was a test that did not reflect what was to come true, according to the Principality, from next May. Adif’s tests show that the AVE could reach 200 kilometers per hour very soon and 275 kilometers per hour in the future. This will save an hour of travel compared to the current route where trains run the Variant at maximum. 80 per hour. This will now take less than an hour to travel between Asturias and Leon, which takes two hours and 12 minutes at best. According to the Ministry of Transport, the journey to Madrid will take around three hours (four hours and 24 minutes at best).
Obviously, there is still a lot of work to be done on the Gijón-Madrid railway line. Circulation tests at 21 kilometers separating the city of León from La Robla have been postponed to 2023. The regional government has estimated that the 31-kilometer road between Pola de Lena and Oviedo will be completed this year, but the project is still under surveillance and the track width for the 24-kilometer distance between Oviedo and Gijón is still under review.
In any case, although the initial plans for the Pajares Ring Road date back to 1982, the first section of the AVE in Asturias territory was well received by the Asturias community after decades of complaining about the lack of rail connection to and from Castilla. Leon and the Spanish capital. Therefore, the majority welcomed the central government’s promise that High Speed would be commercially operational in May, despite the obvious coincidences with the election dates.
The Infrastructure and Mobility Master Plan (PIMA) for Asturias was drawn up in 2015, valid until 2030 (clearly not including all the economic and social impacts of the pandemic), with the AVE becoming operational In total, the average number of trains passing through Pajares per day has doubled. will increase exponentially from about 30 to about 60. Likewise, the Plan prepared by the Principality showed that the steel industry could save 4 million euros by 2024 and 5 million euros in 2030.
The calculations also included savings in coal traffic (more than one million at the end of the decade) and grain, containers and materials for the automobile industry, totaling up to 118 million euros in 2030. The savings that passengers can now benefit from using airplanes, private cars and buses are estimated at around €24m at the end of the decade.
The high-speed train network also plans to expand horizontally. While the national government has rejected a Cantabrian AVE linking Galicia to the Basque Country (considering it won’t have enough demand to make it profitable), Asturias is likely to benefit from future high-speed rail. The Ministry of Transport will connect Bilbao and Santander in an hour, which is less than half the current time.
The existing line between Oviedo and Santander is run by a metric metering network (formerly Feve) with a frequency of four days, two in each direction, between the two cities. Trains with an average speed not exceeding 45 kilometers per hour take the distance of 216 kilometers in about five hours. The journey from Oviedo to Bilbao (without transfers, but with a 27-minute stop in Santander) takes 8 hours and 24 minutes at an average speed of 38 kilometers per hour. Llanes will be just 101 kilometers from the bullet train of the future.
New routes by plane
But Asturias doesn’t just live by train. Air links with the rest of the world will also increase in the spring. On April 23, Lufthansa will start direct flights to Frankfurt and Munich, two of Europe’s main nodes. Specifically, there will be three flights a week with Frankfurt: on Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Flights will depart Germany at 13.45 on Wednesday and Friday and land in Asturias at 16.15, landing five minutes earlier on Sundays. Return flights will arrive on Friday and Sunday at 5 PM, in Frankfurt at 7:35 PM, and in five minutes on Wednesdays.
These links will be added to the links Volotea will operate in Milan-Bergamo and Lisbon in April, and these links will be added to the existing ones from Brussels, Düsseldorf-Weeze, Roma-Fiumicino, Dublin, London-Stansted, London-Gatwick, respectively. , Paris-Orly and Amsterdam.
There are fifteen destinations within Spain: Alicante, Barcelona, u200bu200bFuerteventura, Gran Canaria, Ibiza, Lanzarote, Madrid, Malaga, Menorca, Murcia, Palma de Mallorca, Seville, North Tenerife, South Tenerife and Valencia.
Overall, the numbers are good for Asturias airport. November recorded a total of 121,334 passengers, 16.9% more than before the pandemic of 2019, making last month the best November in the last fifteen years.
In the first eleven months of the year, the number of passengers transiting through Santiago del Monte airport was 1,315,546 passengers, representing a similar number of users compared to the same period of 2019.
Of the total number of passengers traveling on commercial flights, 1,229,987 are departure or arrival points within the national territory and 81,657 are international departure or destination points.
A momentum came from Brussels
The total amount of MRR funds allocated to the Principality for now is 605.8 million. Solar panels in buildings and villas, electric cars, new sustainable boats, centuries-old industries converting fossil fuels to green hydrogen, roads, biomass power plants, railway highways… These funds, also known as European Recovery and Resilience Mechanism (MRR), Next Generation funds aims to revive the continent’s economy and strengthen the transformation of the economy into a sustainable model after the Covid-19 outbreak. Spain aims to obtain 140,000 million euros from these items by 2026.
Of the 605.8 million allocated to Asturias, 112 million are allocated to the energy transition via helplines to productive construction for the inclusion of energy efficiency technologies and systems (storage and self-consumption) or electrified and sustainable mobility. The Principality argues that these elements “represent an opportunity to transform the productive fabric and make our economy more competitive, more efficient, more sustainable and more resilient”.
Currently, many Asturian companies are forming their medium-term strategies with the support of European funds. In the context of an international panorama of high inflation and unknowns, Brussels can be a major accelerator for the economy to regain its pre-pandemic vigor.
At the beginning of the Just Transition
The Just Transition Fund is the European Union’s tool to help regions that have traditionally been more dependent on fossil fuels achieve an economic model in line with their climate change goals. As a region with a significant weight in the steel industry and other industries, Asturias is a clear example of this decarbonisation transition.
It is the Spanish autonomous community that will receive at most 263 million euros from the Fund under the 2021-2027 plan. The planned donation for 2023 is 66 million.
The Principality structured its Just Transition plan around six axes: supporting social infrastructures; ecological transformation of industry, sustainable mobility and circular economy; promoting renewable energies, self-consumption, energy storage and the renewable hydrogen value chain; Directing business projects for promoting SMEs and economic diversification; Promoting R&D+i, ICT integration and digital transformation; and nature conservation, the promotion of heritage and the promotion of sustainable tourism.