“It is the culmination of an old struggle and which, at this moment, gives us the possibility of moving forward with the launch of the work and making up for lost time”, Jorge Paulino told Lusa agency.

For the mayor of Alcoutim, a municipality in the district of Faro, it was “an important decision, but one that is late”, criticizing the time that the Spanish Government took to decide the process.

“We sent the entire process in November 2023 and only now have we received the response. We lost 11 very important months to allow the execution of the cross-border work with financing from the Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR)”, he highlighted.

Paulo Jorge Paulino said that the Spanish executive's decision “will, finally, make it possible to fulfil a long-standing aspiration of the populations and is essential for the economic development of the two regions”.

The Spanish Council of Ministers decided on Tuesday to authorise agreements with Portugal for the construction of two international bridges, one between Alcoutim and Sanlúcar de Guadiana, over the Guadiana River, and the other between Montalvão, in the municipality of Nisa, and Cedilho (Spain), on the River Sever, according to information published on the official website of the Spanish executive.

The agreements will be signed at the 35th Portuguese-Spanish Summit scheduled for Wednesday, in Faro, official Portuguese sources told Lusa.

The meeting will have broad participation, with the presence of 13 ministers from each country, in addition to the two heads of government, Luís Montenegro and Pedro Sánchez, and will be held at Palácio Fialho, in the Algarve capital.

Portugal and Spain had already signed on November 4, 2022, at a summit in Viana do Castelo, a commitment to build the two bridges by 2025.

According to information released at the time, Portugal allocated 9 million euros of European funds from the Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR) for each of these international bridges and tenders for the construction of the two infrastructures had already been launched by the Portuguese authorities.

The two connections are included in the Common Cross-Border Development Strategy that Portugal and Spain agreed on in 2020.

The bridge on the Guadiana will connect Alcoutim, in the Algarve, with Sanlúcar de Guadiana, in Andalusia, two villages that are opposite each other, but currently only have a boat connection between them. The road journey will be reduced by 70 kilometers compared to what is possible today.