Barcelona council's advisory board considers airport expansion 'urgent and necessary'

The Barcelona City Council's board tasked with producing a report on the question of expanding or not the city's airport has today delivered their findings, considering it "urgent and necessary" to increase the capacity of the facility. 

The Infrastructure Advisory Council says this would be needed to increase the number of long-distance flights and cargo planes coming in and out of the Barcelona facility. 

Presenting the report on Wednesday afternoon were Barcelona's deputy mayor, Laia Bonet, the head of the Infrastructure Advisory Council, Santi Vila, and the city council's head engineer, Oriol Altisench. 

The council, which was created by the Barcelona City Council to commission a report on how to tackle the long-running and controversial airport question, also views it necessary to optimize infrastructure that already exist in the airport, such as improving connectivity between T1 and T2, as well as building a new satellite terminal. 

The report believes that with adjustments to the functioning of the airport, it would be possible to increase from the current 78 operations (flights in or out) at the facility to 90. The council believes the airport has the potential to grow significantly in the number of long-haul flights it carries in the next decade or two, and says that these could bring in an additional 50 flights a week, equivalent to an extra million passengers a year. 

However, the report is not clear on whether or not the controversial southern runway should be extended into environmentally protected lands. 

Ultimately, the dictamen is non-binding and is only a list of recommendations to the relevant authorities. 

The board believes it is necessary to meet outstanding environmental compensations from the last expansion, which would give "legitimacy" to the new project. Barcelona deputy mayor Laia Bonet said that any airport expansion project would need to "find consensus with other administrations and sectors," with the goal of "increasing capacity of the airport while respecting environmental regulation of the EU." 

The report of the Infrastructure Advisory Council says that pending environmental improvements must be addressed, specifically increasing the quality of the wetlands in the surrounding area. For any of the airport development alternatives, they say it will be necessary to carry out any environmental compensations before the works begin. 

The Barcelona airport currently operates at close to its maximum capacity, and the advisory council came at the question, they explained, with a starting point of the "model of city we envisage" which should be capable of "attracting talent and being ready to compete in a global world." 

Vila remarked that the current airport model comes from a plan drawn up in 1990, and highlighted the need to update it to reflect the changes and growth the city has experienced in the past more than three decades. 

The document recommends that the relevant authorities conduct informative analyses on alternatives, demand, costs, impacts of all types, as well as carry out an economic, social, and environmental assessment, and initiate the relevant procedures.

Governance of the airport was another important point raised in the dictamen. The council, created by the Barcelona City Council, believes that the local administrations should have more authority in the management of the airport. 

Barcelona airport expansion controversy

Controversy has engulfed the idea of expanding the Barcelona airport whenever the idea has arisen again on the political agenda. 

There are two runways in the airport, one that is used almost exclusively for takeoffs and another for landings. This is done to minimize the noise pollution that neighbors in towns such as Castelldefels would experience. Yet, it also limits how many operations the airport can manage. 

Proposals for airport expansion include ideas to improve terminal capacity and to improve runway capacity, and construction of a satellite terminal has been on the table for years.  

One of the most controversial ideas that has surfaced and resurfaced through the years is the proposal to extend the southern runway by 500 meters, which would mean developing the La Ricarda lagoon and previous wetlands area. 

This natural space has special EU protection as an important habitat for biodiversity, and any plans would need to be approved at the European level. To compensate for this, Aena, Spain’s airport authority, has proposed rewilding hundreds of hectares of land to the opposite side of the airport than that where the Ricarda lagoon is located.  

To learn more about the expansion plans, have a listen at this episode of our podcast Filling the Sink from 2021.