Read news from:
Austria
SHARE
COPY LINK
For members

INSIDE SPAIN

Inside Spain: Underwater train to Morocco and long waits to see a doctor

In this week’s Inside Spain we look at the plans for an underwater train linking Spain to Morocco, and why waits to see a doctor this summer are expected to be worse than ever.

Published: 8 June 2024 13:07 CEST
Inside Spain: Underwater train to Morocco and long waits to see a doctor
The initial plan is for the tunnel linking Spain to Morocco to be completed by 2030, but there is no official agreement yet. Image render: SECEGSA

Inside Spain is our weekly look at some of the news, talking points and gossip in Spain that you might not have heard about. It’s published each Saturday but members can receive it earlier in their inbox by going to their newsletter preferences or adding their email to the sign-up box in this article.

It may seem outlandish, but if the Channel Tunnel was possible, why not an underwater train across the Strait of Gibraltar?

This megaproject has been in the pipeline since 1989 but the prospect of Madrid and Casablanca being linked by rail now is apparently more feasible than ever. 

Last March, Spanish Transport Minister Oscar Puente was in Rabat for talks with the Moroccan government which included discussing the possibility of jointly developing a 40-km tunnel from Spain’s most southern tip to the north African nation. 

A total of 27.7 kms between Tangiers and Punta Paloma (Tarifa, Cádiz) would have to be built not just under water but under the sea bed, the same excavation method used for the Channel Tunnel, and the one found to be the safest, less invasive for marine traffic and for the environment.

Proposed undersea tunnel connecting Spain and Morocco. Graph: SECEGSA

The initial plan is to have the underwater trains running in time for the 2030 World Cup, which will be held in Spain, Portugal and Morocco. 

It took six years for the 50-km Channel Tunnel connecting Britain with France to be completed, so it may be a tough ask for Spain and Morocco to complete the same feat of engineering that fast, especially as they haven’t officially agreed to it yet. 

Apart from it offering an incredible new travel experience between Spain and Morocco – Europe and Africa – the trains would also be used to transport freight, opening up profitable new import/export routes between the two continents.

It would be incredible if this futuristic train did materialise but knowing Spain’s track record for delayed rail and other gargantuan projects, we shouldn’t really hold our breath.

On a completely different note, the Spanish press has reported this week that there will be a serious shortage of doctors working at Spain’s hospitals over the summer. 

Increasingly long waits to see a specialist at public hospitals in Spain have been making headlines recently. 

Poor work conditions, better pay overseas spurring Spanish doctors to move, and a gigantic bureaucratic hold-up involving the recognition of thousands of foreign doctors’ qualifications all mean Spain’s healthcare system is understaffed.

READ ALSO: Record 850,000 people waiting to have an operation in Spain

Having nowhere near enough doctors during the summer however is a problem that’s been happening “for 20 years” according to the head of the Spanish Society of Primary Health José Polo, who says authorities “argue about it without trying to find a solution to the problem”.

It’s as simple as too many doctors going on holiday during the summer, as most Spaniards do, a setback that surely could be quite easily avoided with better organisation.

This year’s shortages are expected to be particularly bad due to the fact that junior doctors who are part of the “Covid generation” and suffered delays in their studies as a result of the pandemic should have begun their residency in June but instead are beginning in September. 

Spain’s Health Minister Monica García has passed the buck to the regional government, arguing that it’s their responsibility to address their shortages of doctors.

The initial plan seems to be to throw 2,500 of these not-quite-qualified medical students in the deep end to cover the vacation time of the senior physicians, “a patchwork” that won’t work according to health professionals.

READ ALSO: Spain’s plan to stop the privatisation of public healthcare

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.

INSIDE SPAIN

Inside Spain: Valencia’s mosquito plague and dictatorship villages

In this week's Inside Spain we look at how Valencia is releasing 1.3 million sterile mosquitoes to deal with an insect plague and how villages named after Spain's dictator Franco are ignoring a law forcing them to change their names.

Published: 22 June 2024 13:09 CEST
Inside Spain: Valencia's mosquito plague and dictatorship villages

Recent stormy weather and heat in the Valencian Community has led to a tiger mosquito plague, with these potentially dangerous insects now found in 464 of the region’s 542 municipalities.

Asian tiger mosquitoes can transmit a number of serious diseases including Eastern Equine Encephalitis (EEE), the Zika virus, West Nile virus and dengue fever.

Even Valencia’s health department is referring to it as an “invasion” in a new campaign in which citizens are asked to not accumulate water on surfaces, to empty pets’ water bowls frequently and to clean drains and gutters more regularly. 

In fact, Valencia’s City Council had already launched an ingenious campaign in which it released 1.3 million sterile mosquitoes that don’t bite humans, in order to mate with blood-sucking mosquitoes and produce non-viable eggs.

Tiger mosquitoes were first detected in Spain in 2004 and have become particularly common in the country’s Mediterranean regions. 

As a result of the proliferation of this alien species in Spain, a handful of dengue fever and other mosquito-borne diseases have been detected in Spain in recent years. 

Perhaps it’s not enough to sound the alarm just yet but the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) warned this June that almost twice as many cases of diseases caused locally by mosquito bites were confirmed across the EU in 2023 compared to the previous year (from 71 up to 130).

Let’s hope Valencia’s sterile mosquito release, which has been successfully tried-and-tested elsewhere, works. 

Insect plagues are nothing new to Spain, and whether it’s black flies or cockroaches, they tend to thrive during summer.

Unfortunately, increasingly rising temperatures in Spain are only serving to make the problem worse, especially when it comes to invasive species such as the tiger mosquito, as confirmed by the Spanish government.

On a completely different note, Spain’s Democratic Memory Law, sometimes called the Historical Memory Law, came into force in October 2022.

It’s a piece of wide-ranging but controversial legislation that aims to settle Spanish democracy’s debt to its past and deal with the complicated legacies of its Civil War and the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, which lasted from 1939 to 1975.

READ ALSO: 13 changes you may have missed about Spain’s new ‘Civil War’ law

One of lesser known clauses of the law forces municipalities named after Franco or which celebrate the dictator or fascism in some way to have to change their names (in fact, another law from 2007 already forced them to do this).

These include Llanos del Caudillo, Villafranco del Guadalhorce, Alberche del Caudillo, San Leona de Yagüe, Alcocero de Mola, to name a few. 

In case you were wondering, caudillo means “commander” and is how Franco was known (similar to Hitler’s Führer), whereas Yagüe and Mola were the surnames of two fascist leaders who carried out atrocities during Spain’s Civil War and Francoist times. 

However, most of these municipalities have dragged their feet with regard to charge their towns’ and villages’ names, either missing the deadline by which it could be done or arguing that they have no links to Franco and that their toponyms are part of Spanish history. 

The case reflects how Spain’s fascist dictatorship and Civil War legacy don’t have the same blanket negative associations that Nazism has in Germany for example, where legislation wiping all trace of Hitler’s influence has been applied more efficiently.

SHOW COMMENTS