Eduardo González
On June 26, the two agreements for the construction of two international bridges over the Guadiana and Sever rivers, agreed upon in October 2024 during the 35th Spanish-Portuguese Summit, entered into force.
The Spanish-Portuguese Summit, held on October 23 in the Portuguese town of Faro (Algarve, in the south), concluded with the signing of eleven agreements on areas such as water, the environment, and culture, and with the commitment of both governments to ask France and the European Commission to facilitate rail and energy interconnections between the Iberian Peninsula and the rest of Europe.
Regarding infrastructure, Spain and Portugal agreed in Faro to build two international bridges: one that will connect the towns of Sanlúcar de Guadiana (Spain) and Alcoutim (Portugal) across the Guadiana River, and the other that will connect the towns of Cedillo (Spain) and Montalvão-Nisa (Portugal) across the Sever River.
The objective of both agreements, according to the Government, is to “improve the conditions for the movement of vehicles and people between the two states,” thereby contributing not only to increasing the flow of people and improving human and economic exchanges between the two countries, but also to developing cross-border areas located, on the one hand, in the Autonomous Community of Andalusia and the Algarve Region, and, on the other, in the Autonomous Community of Extremadura and the Alentejo Region.
During the aforementioned Faro summit, Portuguese Prime Minister Luís Montenegro expressed his “very special thanks for the efforts of President Pedro Sánchez on an issue that was very blocked” and which he himself had raised during their bilateral meeting in Madrid in April 2024. Portugal and Spain had already signed a commitment to build the two bridges by 2025 on November 4, 2022, during the Spanish-Portuguese Summit in Viana do Castelo.
Both agreements, which refer to the Framework Agreement between the Kingdom of Spain and the Portuguese Republic on improving access between the two countries, signed in Albufeira on November 30, 1998, and in force since August 3, 2001, were signed in Faro by the Spanish Minister of Transport and Sustainable Mobility, Óscar Puente, and the Portuguese Deputy Minister for Territorial Cohesion, Manuel Castro Almeida.
