On Monday 22 June, the Official Spanish Chamber of Commerce in Belgium and Luxembourg hosted a breakfast debate with José Antonio Sebastián, the Spanish Government’s Commissioner for the Atlantic Corridor, who gave a presentation on the development and implementation of the corridor in Spain, highlighting its main challenges for the near future.

The breakfast debate began with an introduction to the speaker by the Chamber’s president, Pablo López Álvarez. Sebastián then took the floor and began his address by thanking the Chamber for its “hard work”.

The Atlantic Corridor is one of the nine major priority transport corridors included in the European Union’s Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T), and, as its Commissioner explained, it is the most developed, having doubled in length over the last ten years.

An interconnected Europe

Beyond what has already been completed, investment to continue developing the Corridor has increased sixfold in projects already budgeted for: over the next five years, it will reach 12 billion euros.

In this regard, Sebastián analysed two of the Corridor’s most significant projects in Spain. The first, the Lisbon–Madrid link, will evolve over the coming years from a journey taking around nine hours by train – with at least two compulsory changes – to a direct journey taking just three hours by the early 2030s.

The second connection, the Madrid–Paris line, will take a little longer to materialise and will depend largely on cooperation from the French authorities. In this regard, Sebastián praised the European Commission’s coordination efforts to drive forward the full integration of the Corridor and called for cross-border cooperation to give the project the European dimension for which it was conceived.

The event concluded with an extensive Q&A session covering topics such as the Iberian track gauge and its impact on rail links with France and Portugal, as well as military rail transport.