Eduardo González
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has announced the first tenders related to the forthcoming transfer of its headquarters to the Marqués de Salamanca mansion, in Madrid, whose start-up is intended to coincide with “the vacating, on November 21, of the Torres Ágora headquarters due to the termination of the current lease contract”.
On April 30, the Official State Gazette (BOE) published a call for tenders from the Ministry’s Contracting Board for “the service of moving and transferring work posts from the headquarters of Torres Ágora and Pechuán to the new headquarters of the Marqués de Salamanca mansion of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation”.
The tender is called by the “accelerated open” procedure, because of “the need to make the implementation in the new headquarters of the MAUC located in the mansion of the Marqués de Salamanca square coincide with the vacating on November 21 of the Torres Ágora headquarters due to the termination of the current lease contract”, continued the announcement, signed on April 16 by the Deputy Director General of the Budget Office, Cecilia Rocha, and with an estimated value of 304,711.35 euros.
Likewise, the BOE published yesterday another tender notice, in this case from the Undersecretariat of Foreign Affairs, for the “supply of furniture for the assembly hall, press room, meeting point, multipurpose room, information, documentation and distribution area and work areas of the Palacete de la Plaza del Marqués de Salamanca, 8”. The estimated value of the tender, signed by the Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs, María Celsa Nuño, is 595,861.55 euros. The procedure is also “accelerated open” due to the need to make the implementation in the new headquarters “coincide with the eviction on November 21 of the Torres Ágora headquarters due to the termination of the current lease contract”.
Last January, the Government informed during the Conference of Ambassadors that the objective of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is to begin the transfer of its civil servants to the headquarters in Plaza del Marqués de Salamanca around the month of November. The return to the Plaza del Marqués de Salamanca is desired by most diplomats and other Ministry officials, who consider it a much more representative location than the headquarters they currently occupy in Torres Ágora, north of the M-30.
The building, which for several decades was the headquarters of the former National Institute of Industry, is located at number 8, Plaza del Marqués de Salamanca on a plot of 11,166 square meters. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs abandoned the Marqués de Salamanca headquarters in 2004 because of naphthalene, a toxic and flammable substance, and the then Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ana Palacios, decided to move it to Torres Ágora, where the bulk of the Ministry has been located since then. As a result of that move, the Ministry has paid more than 130 million euros in rents.
In 2012 it was decided to refurbish and recover the Marqués de Salamanca building and in 2014 the works were awarded to the company Tragsa, based on a project by the architectural firm Mira, Milla y Navarro Arquitectos S.L. and under the direction of the Directorate General of State Heritage. The project was approved in 2016 and the rehabilitation works on the building began in October 2017. Since then, the works have been delayed more than expected, for one reason or another. As a result of the delays and the problems detected during the works, the initial budget, which was 69 million, has been increasing to reach, as recently published by Cinco Días, 84 million euros. In December 2019 it was assured that the building would be ready a year later, but the COVID-19 pandemic further swelled the long list of previous delays.
