Spain extends restrictions on flights from Brazil and South Africa

The Spanish government announced this Tuesday, May 4, to extend the restrictions on flights from Brazil and South Africa until May 25, in order to control the spread of variants of the coronavirus.

This is the seventh extension of this measure introduced on February 2.

Only Spanish and Andorran citizens and foreign residents in Spain and Andorra can fly from these two countries.

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Passengers in international transit to a non-Schengen country with a stopover of less than 24 hours are also allowed to travel but are not allowed to leave the airport and cannot stay more than 24 hours. The variants discovered in South Africa and Brazil are worrying the international community, which is questioning their contagiousness and the effectiveness of vaccines against them. For passengers from these two countries, Spain also imposes a quarantine on arrival, a measure recently extended until May 3. This quarantine is ten days, or seven days if a negative PCR test has been presented. It is also mandatory for passengers from ten other countries, including Peru and Colombia.

Since April 28, Spain has also introduced a ten-day quarantine for passengers from India where the health situation is increasingly worrying. Madrid on the other hand lifted the restrictions in force since the end of December on arrivals from the United Kingdom at the end of March. Spain remains one of the European countries most affected by the pandemic with more than 78,000 deaths and more than 3.5 million cases diagnosed.