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A 'Chunnel' for Spain and Morocco
From Morocco's city of Tangier, Spain is just nine miles away. Engineers hope the planned link could be done by 2025.
(By Joachim Ladefoged -- Associated Press)
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"The engineers will always tell you everything is possible, it's just a question of more money," said Ricardo Diaz, secretary general of the Spanish government agency that oversees the project with its Moroccan partners. "But there is one very important piece of information: the geology, which on this land is a tormented, very difficult geography, not like the Channel Tunnel or other tunnels."
Also looming large is the red ink incurred by the Chunnel. Private investors, who paid the bulk of the $20 billion price tag, have suffered heavy losses; the operator, Eurotunnel, has verged on bankruptcy for years.
While neither Moroccan nor Spanish officials have given a bottom-line estimate for their project, private analysts said it could cost $6.5 billion to $13 billion. The two nations said that they are a long way from resolving financing details but that they hope to rely heavily on the European Union and the private sector.
In some ways, a tunnel would mirror changes that are already taking place in the form of increased trade and immigration between Europe and North Africa.
The number of Moroccan immigrants in Spain has soared in recent years; more than 500,000 live there legally, according to official statistics, while many more are undocumented residents. At the same time, droves of Europeans are rediscovering the charms of Morocco, a former Spanish and French colony that won independence in 1956. Morocco hopes to attract 10 million tourists by 2010, up from the record 6 million who visited in 2005.
Crowds pack the passenger ferries that shuttle between Tangier and Algeciras, Spain, especially in the summer, when seasonal workers travel back and forth. Mohammed Chatt, who runs a travel agency outside the port's gates in Tangier, said he doesn't expect the tunnel to be built quickly but has no doubt that millions of people would use it.
"Obviously, it would be very successful," he said. "If there was a tunnel, you could get on the train and just go. And if you consider the tunnel under the English Channel, well, lots of people said that would never be built, either."
Special correspondent Jennifer Green in Madrid contributed to this report.
