ARCHIVED - Contract for resumption of Portmán bay regeneration to be put out to tender in May

The intention of the national government is to restore the original coastline of the natural harbour

When the contract to partially recover and regenerate the bay of Portmán in the municipality of La Unión was finally awarded in 2016, following years of concerted campaigning by local residents and several "false starts", it was anticipated that the work would be completed in 2020, but frustratingly, progress came to an abrupt halt early in 2019 after the processes by which that contract was won by a consortium formed by Ciomar and Marco were called into question.

Now, though, two years later, it has been announced that the contract to resume the work will be put out to tender by the national government during May, and the Secretary of State for the Environment, Hugo Morán, promises that the chosen course of action will be to recover almost the whole of the bay which was filled in by unscrupulous mining companies during most of the 20^th century and has frequently been referred to as being one of Spain's worst ecological disasters.

The project will include not only the removal of the mining slurry, which contains contaminating steriles, but also measures to guarantee the safety of the local population during the work and the protection of the natural environment.

The intention of the Ministry of Ecological Transition is now closer to the demands of the residents, in that the work result in an approximate restoration of the coastline as it stood in 1957 – and indeed as far back as Roman times, when the natural harbour afforded by the bay earned it the name of “Portus Magnus”.

At the moment, the sea is almost 1 kilometre from the original shoreline.