Laurence Dollimore
THE Costa del Sol is furious after being left out of talks which will allow parts of the country to be excluded from the UK’s quarantine on travellers arriving from Spain.
President of the Tourism Costa del Sol body Francisco Salado announced this morning that he will be sending a letter to the foreign ministry to demand that Spain fights for the whole of Andalucia to be taken off the quarantine order.
Salado said it is not the first time the national government has ‘discriminated’ against the southernmost region during this crisis.
“It happened before when the indefinite extension of ERTEs was agreed with the Canary Coalition and only for the Canary Islands,” he said.
It comes after it was revealed that the Spanish government is working with the Canary and Balearic Islands to negotiate an exemption for these two regions from the UK’s quarantine imposition.
The talks are being led by Foreign Minister Arancha Gonzalez Laya.
“Our efforts at the moment are focused on ensuring that the British authorities can exclude the Balearic Islands and the Canary Islands from their quarantine measures; in principle responding to the specificity of both, highly controlled island territories and, secondly, attending to epidemiological data in the Balearic and Canary Islands that are far below epidemiological data in the United Kingdom,” Laya said in a statement at the weekend.
“We are working together with the autonomous governments of the Canary and Balearic Islands and we hope the talks will bear fruit soon.”
Laya insisted that Spain is a safe country.
“Like other European countries, Spain has outbreaks, this is not unusual,” the minister said,”the most important thing is that Spain is making a great effort to control these outbreaks, a huge effort to identify cases in which people are positive for coronavirus.”
The statement added that half of the cases being detected are from asymptomatic people.
“Once these cases have been identified, a great effort is being made to implement social isolation measures,” it read.
