The Quiero Corredor movement promoted by the Valencian Association of Entrepreneurs (AVE) arrived yesterday at the last stop of the itinerant action that, like the train they long for, has been traveling through different Mediterranean cities. And he did it between demands for the infrastructure and among others of a political-economic nature, because businessmen and politicians, among them the re-elected mayor of Alicante, Luis Barcala, focused on the slowness of the works due to the low investment of the State in the province of Alicante in the PGE.
“I ask that Alicante really be incorporated, that there be a will to incorporate it by putting money in the Budgets and a date in the executions,” said Barcala. “In the exhibition, that Alicante hole in the Mediterranean corridor is very clear,” lamented the first mayor. Barcala responded to the call of Diego Lorente, general director of AVE, and who has conveyed the same message of partial dissatisfaction in all the cities, or of ‘glass half full’, since the works are advancing, but not at the pace that he claims, or needs, the Valencian company.
The president of the Alicante Chamber of Commerce, Carlos Baño, assured that “it seems to us a real insult to the people of Alicante and it is essential for the Mediterranean corridor that it continue and that what was the Torrellano variant be preserved, as well as the duplicity of the Elche tunnel because otherwise it would become a funnel”. In yesterday’s event, the focus was placed on these sections as well as on La Encina, the first stage in which AVE was photographed as a protest platform.
“The movement has ensured that the corridor is all up and running, but even so we do not agree with the pace at which the works are going and the Encina junction is what can finally structure the Valencian Community”, argued Lorente, who The tour of Barcelona, ??Antequera and Cartagena closes with Alicante, cities in which more than 3,000 people have come to see their “labyrinth of delays” and where they have obtained more than 2,000 signatures.
With regard to the arrival of the AVE action in Alicante, the former platform ‘Variante de Torrellano Ya’ has issued a statement in which they establish that the execution of the Mediterranean corridor as it passes through the city of Alicante can only be through the Torrellano variant, “and never adapting the current coastal road due to a disastrous investment policy of the central government in the city of Alicante and the null political weight of our local and provincial representatives in Valencia and Madrid”.
Although the construction of the Torrellano bypass implies, in the long term, raising the coastline, the Ministry of Transport decided to provisionally electrify and adapt the road to a standard gauge to guarantee freight traffic through the Mediterranean corridor and the quality of the Cercanías service between the cities of Murcia and Alicante.
In yesterday’s meeting, in addition to Lorente, Barcala and Baño, there were Joaquín Pérez, president of the CEV of Alicante; José Vicente Morata, president of the Valencia Chamber of Commerce; Mª Dolores Guillamón, president of the Chamber of Commerce of Castellón; Lourdes Soriano, director of the Council of Chambers of Commerce; Maite Antón, president of AEFA; Marián Cano, president of AVECAL; José Vicente Andreu, president of ASAJA: Julián López, president of the Port Authority of Alicante; Federico Fuster, president of HOSBEC; Nuria Montes, general secretary of HOSBEC; Antonio Arias, president of Vectalia; Vicente Bagán, president of Grupo Altadia; Gianni Cechin, president of Verne; Pere Joan Devesa, President of Hoteles Devesa; Antonio Montilla, president of Atlántica Agrícola; among other representatives of civil society, as well as Francisco Giner, president of Natavi and César Soler, president of Sanchis Mira.
