At the beginning of the 21st century, Antequera (Málaga, 41,178 inhabitants) dreamed big. The urban plans drew in its enormous municipal area two AVE stations, a huge railway logistics area and even an airport along with hundreds of homes. Except for the airfield, everything has become a reality in two decades. The last to arrive has been the Dry Port, a million-dollar project that seeks to merge freight transport by train and road. With it, the city “has all the opportune and optimal conditions to become the great logistics node of southern Europe,” according to what the president of the Andalusian Government, Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla, said during its inauguration. It is the cherry on top of a town with more infrastructure than many provincial capitals. Everything indicates that the moment of truth has arrived for an Antequera that generated many expectations but that has had a stagnant population for years (it has 500 fewer residents than a decade ago) and whose tourist emergence continues in the shadow of the Costa del Sol.
The municipality has been a historic crossroads. Already in the Neolithic it was, as demonstrated by its dolmens declared World Heritage and the Via Domitiana Augusta confirmed it in the times of ancient Rome. Its geographical location, in the center of Andalusia, turned it many centuries later into a railway junction and in recent decades also a road junction: the A-45 and A-92 highways to Malaga, Córdoba, Seville and Granada have their link. next to the urban area, exactly what convinced Mercadona to promote its first Andalusian logistics center in 2000. Then Antequera became the only city, along with Madrid, with two AVE stations. “Rail corridors are vital for growth because they benefit tourism, industry, students and workers,” said the then Minister of Transportation, Raquel Sánchez, during the inauguration of the second station. And all of this is what the French company IDEC Group now wants to take advantage of, which signed its arrival at the Dry Port on the same day that the pandemic closed Spain. Their money has promoted the project together with the Andalusian Administration in a public-private collaboration that is already the watchword of a government, that of Moreno Bonilla, which has managed - with its controversial Project Accelerator - to make an initiative a reality in five years. which had been aground for 15 years, since it was devised by businessman Domingo de Torres. It is expected to serve to create 8,000 direct jobs and 16,000 indirect jobs, according to the Junta de Andalucía.
For now, today the Dry Port is a succession of empty roads, large roundabouts and three viaducts. From them you can see a landscape featuring the green color of the wheat fields and the yellow of the dandelions that cover the surroundings. There are thousands of olive trees visible and an old ruined farmhouse with the El Torcal mountain range and the railway tracks to Bobadilla and the AVE to Madrid completing the landscape. This first phase, of 100 hectares, has involved an investment of 50 million euros. It is the first step of a project that aims to reach 338 hectares with 150 million more investments in the coming years. “This was always a textbook project: it has everything that a logistics and industrial project should have,” explains Maite Palomino, development director of the IDEC Ibérica Group, who highlights the proximity of the train, the highways, and the ports of Malaga and Algeciras. or its situation in the Andalusian heart.
The French parent company of the IDEC Group has logistics projects in its country and others such as Vietnam, Switzerland, Italy or Sweden and hopes to convert the Antequera logistics area into a benchmark for multimodal freight transport. It still remains. There are still no established companies and while the first warehouses arrive and are built – something planned for 2025 – the administrations are laying the groundwork. The Malaga Provincial Council has already fixed the surrounding roads and the Board has put out to tender both the extension of the A-384 that connects the site with the A-92 and the connection of the site with the Bobadilla railway line, which will have extra platforms. of 750 meters that will allow the exchange of goods. The space will serve as storage for containers that arrive at the Port of Malaga and Algeciras, but it will also be a place from which to send them—even with the truck that transports them—to Europe and to remote destinations such as China.
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To do this, of course, it needs the Malaga port area to have its active railway track again and for the Government to finish promoting the Atlantic Corridor and complete the pending sections of the Mediterranean Corridor - 1,500 kilometers of tracks that will link Algeciras (Cádiz) with the French border passing through Valencia and Barcelona—scheduled for 2026 or “2030 at the latest,” according to former Minister Sánchez said last year. The promoters trust this because, otherwise, they would not have invested so much money. “This project can become one of the most important in Spain. It is a before and after for Antequera if all the administrations push at the same time to meet the deadlines,” adds José Ramón Carmona, general secretary of the Malaga PP and Andalusian parliamentarian.
Stagnant population
For years, Antequera has had the infrastructure and tourist wealth to take off, but it never does so definitively. “It had its strategic planning, but then it became detached from the municipal dynamics and society has lost a lot of drive,” explains María del Carmen García Peña, director of the CIEDES Foundation (Center for Strategic Research and Economic and Social Development). The also professor of Economic Policy at the University of Malaga (UMA) encourages the municipal government to promote a platform where the entire society participates to take advantage of the strengths of the enclave. “In addition, we already have the city as part of the metropolitan area due to the importance of its industrial and technological axis,” insists the head of the Ciedes Foundation, which designs the Malaga of the future.
Antequera is stuck at just over 41,000 inhabitants for more than a decade (in which it has lost 500 residents) and although at the tourist level the declaration of the Dolmens Site as World Heritage gave it a boost to exceed half a million visits, it still It is far from the all-powerful Costa del Sol. “The municipality has many prospects for consolidation, but it will depend on real investment and the companies that want to locate there,” says Víctor Heredia, historian and professor of Economic History at the University of Malaga ( UMA), who remembers that “there were always great expectations, but the crisis that began in 2007 slowed everything down a lot.” It also had positive consequences, such as the airport not being built. “Look how other similar ones have ended up,” emphasizes who, of course, lacks “affordable, regular and quality” public transport for people. In fact, bus connections to Malaga are scarce and the absence of a Cercanías hampers the city of Antequera. “If you could get from there to the capital in 25 minutes it would be the definitive factor for its momentum,” he concludes.
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