The bell towers ring again
A feeling of déjà vu It's been firmly embedded in my brain since last week. It seemed that the future Tarragona Metropolitan Area had been moving forward at a good pace for a few months, and then suddenly, it came to a screeching halt. The reef is the location of the intermodal railway station. There seemed to be consensus that this essential infrastructure for mobility in Camp de Tarragona should be located in the municipality of Vila-seca, but the mayor of Tarragona, Rubén Viñuales, moved it to the so-called Horta Gran, to the west of the city. His counterpart from Vila-seca, Pere Segura, reacted vehemently and abandoned the work around the metropolitan area, with Valls' support for his position. The mayor of Reus, Sandra Guaita, distances herself from her party colleague from Tarragona and continues to support Vila-seca.
The author recalls the Camp de Tarragona Consortium, the supra-municipal body of the first decade of the 21st century led by Joan Miquel Nadal and Lluís Miquel Pérez, mayors of Tarragona and Reus, with its headquarters in Vila-seca, then governed by Josep Poblet, who would take over the presidency in 2007. A year earlier, the Camp de Tarragona AVE Station had been inaugurated, between La Secuita and Perafort. It had taken a long time for the high-speed train to have a stop in Tarragona, since the initial project drawn up in Madrid linked Lleida and Barcelona without setting foot in the demarcation.
An engineer, one of those who knows a thing or two about the subject, explained to me that that station in the interior of Tarragonès only made sense if a few kilometers away there was an intermodal station that was the true communications hub: tram, buses, Reus airport... Nineteen years have passed, and after what we have spent nineteen years and, after which to locate.
The Camp de Tarragona Consortium ended up disappearing discreetly. A new generation of politicians has arrived and it seemed that something had changed. But no. We are people of lightning and the bell towers are ringing loudly again and, amidst the peals, mobility in the second metropolitan area of Catalonia remains unresolved.