At midday, the State Secretary for Global Spain, Manuel Muñiz, reviewed a series of national and international factors that “trace out a much better scenario for this summer than last year”, and that inspire “reasonable optimism” in terms of the recovery of international mobility and tourism. He did so at the inauguration of the forum entitled ‘Flying in the summer: how to recover tourism and the national economy’, organised by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) within the framework of the 41st edition of Fitur.

Manuel Muñiz highlighted, at an EU level, the approval of the Green Digital Certificate – an “EU Regulation that is directly applicable throughout the EU that seeks to offer reliability in the individual health certification of each passenger, with information on vaccination, diagnostic testing and whether they have recovered from the disease”, which the border authorities will be able to verify digitally.

He recalled that “Spain has been working for some months now so that, as from June, we will be able to issue and accept these digital certificates” and trusted that the rest of the EU countries will also be able to roll this out swiftly following approval of the Regulation”. The aim is that “between now and June, most non-essential movement in the EU will be resolved through the use of this certificate or similar physical documents at borders”.

At a global level, Manuel Muñiz welcomed the agreement reached today by the 27 EU Member States to reopen its external border to tourists vaccinated in third countries by inoculation vaccines that have been approved by the European Medicines Agency (EMA), such as those from the United States and the United Kingdom. This is “very good news for our country”, which has been very active and one of the first countries to review Recommendation 912”, whereby the EU had banned all non-essential travel together with more than 180 countries. Furthermore, as a result of the revision carried out today by the Committee of Permanent Representatives (COREPER), which will be formalised tomorrow by the Foreign Affairs/Trade Council, the epidemiological threshold will be raised to consider a country to be safe and vaccination will be introduced as a criterion of health certification for travellers.

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The State secretary also recalled that, since December, Spain has headed up an initiative before the OECD to approve a global testing and heath certificate at an international level, and this is expected to be introduced as from 31 May. For the State Secretary for Global Spain, “this would be a milestone whereby all international organisations that address mobility reach an agreement in the field of testing”.

All these measures mean, according to Manuel Muñiz, that “we will have extensive mobility with EU countries, where most of our visitors come from, with a view to the summer”, and that a longer list will exist than at present of safe countries.

In addition to these factors, the State secretary mentioned those that began to be employed at the end of last year and that will continue to be applied in the coming months, such as the rollout of vaccinations, the approval of the Multiannual Financial Framework and the Next Generation EU funds of the European Union, under which the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan will start to be implemented in the autumn, the approval of the National Budget, the Brexit Agreement and the stimulus plans recently announced by the US Administration, which Spanish companies will benefit from.