The Diplomat
The Government has decided to abolish the General Consulates of Spain in Washington D.C., Cartagena de Indias, Genoa and Alexandria as part of the “efforts to redeploy the foreign service and budget rationalization” provided by the recently approved Foreign Action Strategy 2021-2024.
The Council of Ministers approved this past Tuesday -and the Official State Gazette (BOE) published yesterday- the royal decrees abolishing the General Consulates of Spain in Washington D.C., Cartagena de Indias, Genoa and Alexandria, at the initiative of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Arancha González Laya, at the proposal of the Minister of Territorial Policy and Public Function, Miquel Iceta, and with the favorable report of the Minister of Finance, María Jesús Montero.
The Government has adopted these decisions “following criteria of geographical evolution, redeployment efforts of the foreign service and budgetary rationalization” and after considering that the human and material resources of these consular offices “will be more useful in other existing consulates general”.
Precisely, the Foreign Action Strategy 2021-2024, authorized and submitted to the Spanish Parliament by the Council of Ministers on January 26, establishes among its priorities the “redeployment” of the network of Diplomatic Missions and Consular Posts abroad, in order to “adapt it to the needs of the Spanish communities, to the increase in the demand for visas or to the opening of new market spaces for tourists and business for Spain”.
According to the Royal Decrees, which entered into force yesterday, the functions of the General Consulate in Washington will be assumed by a Consular Section of the Embassy of Spain in the United States, which will have jurisdiction over the States of Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina and the District of Columbia. This remodeling will free up two civil servant positions that can be used to staff other consulates.
Likewise, the functions of the General Consulate of Spain in Cartagena de Indias (Colombia) will be assumed by the General Consulate of Spain in Bogotá, with jurisdiction over the departments of Atlántico, Bolívar, Cesar, Córdoba, Guajira, Magdalena, Norte de Santander and Sucre. The General Consulate in Cartagena de Indias was closed, in fact, in February 2020 and was replaced in the following month by an Honorary Consulate.
On the other hand, the General Consulate in Genoa (Italy), with jurisdiction over the demarcations of Valle d’Aosta, Piedmont, Tuscany, Liguria and the Island of Elba and which has already been, in practice, for more than two decades in an interim situation (in fact, it has been closed since last June), will be abolished and its jurisdiction will be integrated into the jurisdiction of the General Consulates of Spain in Milan and Rome.
In the same sense, the demarcation of the General Consulate in Alexandria (Egypt), which covers the provinces of Alexandria, Marsa Matruh, Behera, Dakahlia, Damieta, Gharbie, Kafr el Sheik, Menufia, Sharkeia and Kaliubia, will be integrated into the Consular Section of the Embassy of Spain in Cairo.
