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ARCHIVED - Canary Islands will welcome Brits this summer says Spanish Tourism Minister
According to the Minister of Tourism, the Canary Islands are "on the verge" of recovering the British tourism market.
The Minister of Industry, Trade and Tourism, Reyes Maroto, is convinced the Canary Islands are on the brink of welcoming British tourists and that UK holidaymakers will be able to spend the summer on the islands and the rest of Spain.
But it is "essential to accelerate the vaccination process and to give confidence that our country is a safe destination", she said.
Maroto added that the Spanish Government is calling on the UK to consider regionalising its traffic light system, taking into consideration the epidemiological situation of each autonomous community rather than the country as a whole; in the case of Spain the situation is radically different in the offshore Balearic Islands which has an accumulated incidence rate of 46 cases per 100,000 over 14 days and the Canary Islands which have a rate of 83 cases, compared to the 151 cases which is the national average. The Valencia region has a rate of only 29 cases and Murcia, Asturias, Extremadura and Galicia all have rates of less than 100.
The UK government has set up green, amber and red lists for travel this summer, and if regional data was taken into consideration, destinations such as the Canary Islands could be removed from its list of risk destinations, given their low incidence of contagion.
Maroto stressed that the Canary Islands is one of the communities most impacted by the pandemic due to its dependence on tourism, which is why she considers it "essential" to recover national and international mobility "for the Canarian economy to reactivate".
"This will allow the restart of millions of tourist trips to the Canary Islands," she added, stressing, however, it is "necessary to speed up the vaccination process and lower the incidence of infections to facilitate the restart of holidays".
At an international level, Maroto said the fact that countries such as Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark have opened up travel to destinations such as the Canary Islands (since Saturday, May 15) "allows us to be optimistic".
She also cited the importance of the European digital green certificate and the relaxation of restrictions on non-essential travel from third countries in enabling the reactivation of international travel in a safe way.
The UK government announced last month that it would introduce a ‘traffic light’ system setting out the restrictions in place for travelling to different countries when international movement re-opened on Monday, May 17.
But Spain is currently on the amber list.
At the moment, travellers from the UK are not allowed into Spain unless they are residents or for certain other reasons until at least May 31 after the Spanish government last month extended restrictions on British travellers so the allocation of Spain to the "amber list" makes little difference for the remainder of the month.
But it will affect all those who have booked flights for the first month of June in the expectation that the restrictions of the Spanish government would be removed and had hoped that Spain would be listed as green.
At the moment, nothing has been officially published changing the date until which British tourists can travel to Spain other than for essential reasons, which remains as May 31.
IMAGE: Turismo de Islas Canarias