Mourning for the Covid-19 epidemic, Spain has seen French tourists arriving on its shores wishing to spend a few days in the sun. The alert was given, on the other side of the Pyrenees, by the daily El País. "Several dozen French families have returned to their second homes on the Costa Brava in recent days, despite the temporary cessation of free movement in the Schengen area," the newspaper said on Wednesday.
As proof, the shutters of certain second homes, usually closed all year round, are now open. As for the premises, many of them have noted the presence of French customers in supermarkets in several cities in Catalonia, such as Rosas, LLançà or El Port de la Selva.
On the French side, a police source contacted by Le Parisien confirms the reality of these trips, without quantifying them. "We note that some are trying to go on vacation despite the confinement," explains Ludovic Romanach, departmental secretary of the Union-SGP-FO union for the Pyrénées-Orientales. We know that Northern Catalans, whether they come from the regions of Toulouse or Montpellier, have managed to pass. This is also what goes back to our discussions with our Spanish colleagues in the Guardia civil. "
However, these flows of tourists remain for the time being "difficult to quantify", judges the police officer. “First, because part of these movements go back to the first hours of confinement. Only the mayors of the municipalities concerned can say what it is, ”he adds.
Secondary roads taken at night
In theory, the border between the two countries has been closed since March 17. Only a minority of individuals can cross it, like cross-border workers or people authorized to do so for health or family reasons. For the rest, the police checkpoints should make traffic between the two states impossible. So how can we explain the arrival of these families on the Catalan coast?
The answer comes from the mayors. According to the elected officials of several Spanish municipalities, these tourists would take secondary roads or forest tracks at nightfall. Alternative routes that would allow them to return to their second homes out of sight. When they arrive, they hide their car in their garage, note to El Pais Montse Mindan, the mayor of the seaside resort of Roses, located 15 kilometers from France.
Fearful of seeing the country's hospitals - already breathless - cracking under the influx of new patients, the authorities have blocked the main roads of several seaside resorts in recent days.
Households monitored by drones
Among them, Calaffel, a small town located an hour from Barcelona, which has seen its main road blocked by concrete blocks. As the municipal police did not have the means to control the dozens of entrances to the city, the town hall decided to barricade the municipality and carry out checks on its main road. Because if the Covid-19 has little affected this province, "health services will not be able to take charge of an avalanche of contaminations", explains to the Parisian mayor Ramon Ferré, who specifies that his city "has passed in two days from 23 to 42 contaminations ".
Newsletter - The essentials of the news
Every morning, the news seen by Le ParisienI'm registering
Your email address is collected by Le Parisien to allow you to receive our news and commercial offers. Find out more
This popular seaside resort is not a special case. Less than a hundred kilometers away, several coastal towns such as Badalona or Ametlla de Mar use drones to monitor population arrivals and even ... household water consumption to identify possible offenders, reports the Catalan newspaper La Vanguardia.
The authorities' concern sometimes even takes the form of a curious "hunting abroad". The mayor of the small Spanish village of Portbou, located not far from the border, thus calls on his constituents to denounce their newly arrived neighbors.
"Being in solidarity sometimes means telling someone that what they are doing is not good," explains Xavier Barranco in a Facebook post. “If you see strangers in the city visiting us on weekends, you have the right to tell them that what they are doing is not good. And that we will denounce them! "
VIDEO. Confinement in Paris: we climbed the top of the Eiffel Tower empty of tourists
While dozens of French tourists have reached the Spanish coast, some of their Spanish neighbors have gone the other way. “Spaniards from the Barcelona region also have second homes in the foothills of the Pyrenees, on the French side, where they have settled, in Cerdanya, near Andorra. These people fled in particular at a time when Spain was experiencing a health crisis even more marked than what France was going through, ”specifies Ludovic Romanach. If the main border axes "are monitored 24 hours a day", it remains "difficult to have a look at the entire secondary network," notes the police officer. These are "old smuggling routes that people who live in the area know well". Roads that they are used to taking in summer, when they want to avoid traffic jams on highways.
"Nearly a third more inhabitants" in Cerdanya
Several villages of Cerdagne, mountainous part of the Pyrenees-Orientales, have since Thursday placed concrete blocks on the roads connecting France to Spain, and this until further notice. "Last weekend, more than 9,000 tourists were added to the 33,000 permanent residents, nearly a third more from regions unfortunately severely affected by the coronavirus," says Georges Armengol, president of the community of Pyrenees Cerdagne, contacted by us.
The sanitary means of the region being limited to "about forty beds", this measure must "avoid us a pandemic that we could not control", worries the elected official.