The Iberian Southwest

WHAT IS IT?

To understand the Iberian Southwest and Extremadura, it is important to understand its orography, before any human intervention.

Firstly, Extremadura occupies a central area of ​​the Iberian Southwest that connects and extends from the Atlantic coast to the Central Plateau.

The southwest limits to the north by the Central System and to the south by Sierra Morena, and is crossed by two river channels with their fertile plains, separated by another internal mountainous system.

This orography has conditioned all our history. Naturally, our exterior exit is the Atlantic coast, we have natural elements that isolate us to the north and south, and internally we are divided into two very different river basins, like no other region in Spain, which are organized practically on a single hydrographic basin or the coastline.

A natural territory that is respected and promoted by the Romans, and then largely continued by the Arabs. It is really the Romans who provide the base of their infrastructures creating in Mérida a first level communications node. Its main routes are still masters of communications in the region.

They connected us with the north and the south with the Vía de la Plata, with the Atlantic coast and with the Mediterranean, and with the main networks of Iberian cities of the time, and built our best bridges and still in use, such as the Alcántara or Mérida.

In addition, the Romans leave us the best works of irrigation, antecedents of the Badajoz Plan, or urban infrastructures or recreation, which still serve us as leisure and tourism, such as the Roman theaters.

However, when the Reconquest arrived, the history of communications and the central position of Extremadura broke for centuries. From the 12th century, one of the oldest borders in Europe, including the world, was created, which remains intact to the present day.

The entire Portuguese border is depopulating; Portugal looks towards the Atlantic, and Spain towards the Mediterranean, where infrastructure and development are concentrated.

Extremadura is cut off from the north by the Central System, and from the South by Sierra Morena. It serves its natural exit through the Central Plateau. Communications and land are put at the service of the Mesta and livestock, leaving the region as a mere winter barn.

Military and clergy assume leadership, being left out of the dynamics of progress in that long period, and the most restless and dynamic characters mostly emigrate.

Extremadura becomes a land of emigration, of cheap labor, but also of its best talents who find their opportunities outside the region, achieving some great recognitions and responsibilities abroad that increasingly distance them from the region and its interests. .

The improvements in communications are always due to decisions of people with decision-making capacity in the Court, as is the case of the settlement in the eighteenth century of the road from Badajoz to Madrid by Campomanes, married to a woman from Alburquerque, and with farms in Merida. Or in the middle of the XIX century, the arrangement of this same road by Bravo Murillo, being Minister of Development Francisco Luján Miguel, coming familiarly from Castuera.

Or twenty years later, the railway line for Cáceres and Valencia de Alcántara was opened, promoted by the first industrial engineer in Spain, Cipriano Segundo Montesino, a native of Valencia de Alcántara who was Deputy, Senator for Cáceres and Director General of Public Works of the Ministry of Development.

And the lobbies or pressure groups are key to the decision-making of infrastructures and the development of the territories.

This advance in the communications of the region in the second half of the 19th century, in addition to the good relations with Portugal, give an impetus to the industry, especially based on mining, which also serves for the development of the railway.

But the region still does not develop an indigenous industrial fabric and continues to maintain a peripheral position territorially, in power circles and in decision-making.

Some decisions on the construction of railroads in the region remain half-built or do not come into operation, because those who promoted the initial decisions changed and new decision-makers redirected public budgets to new interests.

The entry of Spain and Portugal into the EU in 1986 relocated Extremadura and went from being a peripheral region to occupying a focused space between the two states and between the two capitals.

TARGET REGIONS 1

STRUCTURAL FUNDS 2000 – 2006

REGIONS IN CONVERGENCE

STRUCTURAL FUNDS 2007 – 2013

However, expectations are created that were never met.

The isolation and lack of communication that for centuries has generated a vicious circle of poverty and that has made Extremadura the only region in Spain among the least developed in Europe, the formerly called Objective 1, in the current European budget six-year term.

RESOURCES AND CAPABILITIES

 

 

  • Business development of the large agro-food zone and water resources throughout the so-called Badajoz Plan and the Alqueva irrigation systems in Portugal (10 million people).

 

  • Development of the Great Port of Sines in Portugal as a global logistics enclave with capacity for the new needs of world multimodal transport.

 

  • Rail freight and passenger connection between the Portuguese coast and Madrid and the trans-European transport networks.

SOUTHWEST IN NETWORKS

The Iberian Southwest Network in this sense is a movement of support and promotion of the Extremaduran networks of transport and communication connections that aims to create favorable conditions for the development and incorporation of Extremadura in the networks of the 21st century.

  • Internal and external passenger and freight rail networks
  • High capacity road networks and interior capillarity in the region
  • Necessary air connections
  • Electric transmission networks
  • High-capacity digital and telecommunications networks
  • Knowledge and cooperation networks

CONTACT

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