I have already shown that the Mediterranean Corridor is a concept and a reality that has been around for a long time and that goes beyond a specific transport infrastructure or a specific nomination of infrastructure plans. When in 2004 the EU approved the first European transport network with 22 priority axes, it did not consider the Mediterranean Corridor among them, and immediately from Catalonia the FERRMED lobby was promoted and financed to include it in the basic network. After years of work, with large budgets and seeking the complicity of other European regions, it was achieved in 2011. This official lobbying organisation has been complemented by the actions of the Valencian Association of Entrepreneurs (AVE), which has also been working along these lines since 1983, and with great intensity for several years now, in complicity with an extensive network of business organisations and institutions in the Mediterranean area, and with mainly private funding.
Universities, public institutions and civil society in the Mediterranean arc have developed a great complicity and sensibility to demand transport infrastructures, but bearing in mind that the Mediterranean Corridor is much more than specific infrastructures. In the words of the geographer Josep Vicent Boira, the main ideologist of the Mediterranean Corridor today and the person commissioned by the government to promote it: “For me, it is a vector, an arrow, a dynamic, and this has to be taken into account because it goes beyond the traditional idea of a public work that would not need a coordinator”, “It will never be finished, each step forward allows new horizons to be defined”, “I spend almost half of my time in this office teaching, meeting with companies, town councils, regional executives, to propose debates that help to understand the Mediterranean corridor and everything it entails”.
In the Iberian Southwest, we are very far from the reality of the Mediterranean Corridor, but it is a good model on which to base ourselves. To see only the Southwest Iberian Corridor as an infrastructure of the Atlantic Corridor is to have a very short-sighted view. The Southwest Iberian Corridor should aim to be a dynamic of flows rather than a means of transport of a territory. The Southwest Iberian can also be an axis of development, but we need first to visualise it and commit ourselves to it. We will continue to advance the concept.
The Mediterranean Corridor is a unique reality long before the European Union approved it with some lines of financing. The Romans defined it with the Via Augusta that connected Cadiz with Rome passing through the main Mediterranean cities and ports but at the same time created a dense inland connection with the Atlantic, in which Merida was one of its main nodes. It was in the 18th century when the connections via Madrid were centred and a radial relationship of the state was formed, disconnecting the territories between them and leaving the Southwest connection as the only purely interior one. In 1918 the Valencian lawyer, politician and financier Ignacio Villalonga, who after the Civil War promoted the Banco de Valencia, began to claim the Mediterranean Corridor, visualizing it already in an article with this sentence: “a railway will run near the Mediterranean coast, and Valencia will have transit trade from Catalonia and France, with the eastern part of Andalusia and Murcia”. Although there have always been voices calling for these connections since the 1970s, the French border with Alicante was already connected by motorway, making it Spain’s longest motorway connection with Central Europe. After the AVE Madrid-Seville, the next high-speed rail connection was opened with the Euromed that linked Figueres with Alicante. With all its limitations, the Mediterranean coastline was acquiring an increasingly high level of connections with Europe, which limited its impact to the area, as it remained isolated from the rest of the Peninsula. The higher connections soon became insufficient and revealed new needs for development, while other areas did not show the evidence of these needs, becoming increasingly isolated. And these are not two alternative connections, but very complementary ones, as we will show.
You can also read the article in: EL PERIÓDICO DE EXTREMADURA O LA CRÓNICA DE BADAJOZ
