In November 2014, the mayor of Vila Real de Santo António was plainly delighted with progress on the dredging project at the mouth of the Guadiana river, even though nothing had happened, and did not until January this year.
The council, backed by locals dependent on tourism for their livelihood, were left waiting for the Spanish partners to start work.
The work finally started on 05 January 2015, and the silted up river mouth is being dredged to a minimum of 3.5 metres and Luís Gomes, Mayor of Vila Real de Santo António, the operation "represents a 40-year old desire of locals in particular and the Algarve in general, to enable the safe passage of large pleasure and fishing boats."
The mayor said that the work will promote an increase the tourist potential of the Guadiana Eurocity, a cooperative effort between the municipalities of Ayamonte in Spain and Castro Marim and VRSA in Portugal, and enable cruise ships and large vessels to enter the Guadiana 24 hours a day to the cheery delight of parts of the local tourism industry.
The project cost of €723,000 was signed off in Lisbon in March 2014 between the Portuguese government and the Junta de Andalucía.
Ten months later the job starts and is being overseen by the Spanish which means the money will be spent on the project and not distributed to council officials, their families, fake companies set up to defraud the donors with the balance wasted on activities quite unrelated to dredging.
According to Luís Gomes, the project “shows the good relationship between the Portuguese and Spanish,” who cooperated on the dredging project with the common aim of relieving the Guadiana of silt so it could be used again.
The dredging will cover a 1,250 x 60 metre strip with 55,000 cubic metres of sandy sediment to be scraped from the Guadiana river bed and reused to bulk up the beaches around the river mouth.
