Go faster! urges Almeria province’s business, manufacturing and agricultural sector

ALMERIA’S business, manufacturing and agricultural sectors insist ever-louder that the province’s future hangs on the high-speed train.

It was essential that the AVE arrived in 2026 as promised by the central government, Chamber of Commerce president Jeronomo Parra insisted.

“Pressure has to continue,” Parra said. “We must keep on making the first move and make ourselves heard,” Parra said at a meeting of the Objetivo Almeria AVE platform at the Hotel del Este on March 10.

“Our aim is to ensure that our demands reach the offices where political and technical decisions are made, that they arrive wherever there is willingness to advance this project,” he insisted.

Approximately 200 people attended the meeting which was preceded by a well-attended gathering of Objetivo Almeria AVE supporters who assembled near the Pulpi-Vera stretch of the Almeria-Murcia route.

Track operator Adif’s progress on this section, which should have been completed by November 2021, is badly behind schedule, the platform maintained.

Attendees wore hard hats and high visibility jackets, wielding shovels and pickaxes to bring home their message that Adif needed to work faster.

Echoing Parra, Francisco Garcia Calvo, Juan Pedro Garcia and Fernando Rivas – engineers on Objetivo Almeria AVE’s technical committee – agreed that meeting the deadline was feasible.

But for this to happen, they pointed out, the companies awarded the contracts to build Almeria’s three sections of AVE track had to work faster.

“This is a chain with different links,” Garcia Calvo said.  “Any setback, like Greek tortoises or an archaeological site, could hold things up.”