Graffiti of ¨no borders¨ on a sign located at the Coll de Banyuls border crossing, in the province of Girona.©Toni Ferragut
A sign makes it clear to those who drive along this road in Cerdanya, the Pyrenean valley divided since the 17th century between Spain and France.
“Road closed”, it reads coming from the French side.
A few meters further on, several concrete blocks prevent us from continuing.
You have to turn around.
The road between the municipality of Palau, in France, and Puigcerdà, in Spain, is one of the nine that are still officially closed a year after the French Government, on its own, closed twenty of the 37 crossings between both countries.
Over the months some have been reopened, the most recent, the Portillon, in the Valle de Arán, and through some such as Izpegi it is possible to transit even though the authorities lists it as closed.
Paris, in any case, does not intend to open them all in the immediate term.
The border of the Pyrenees has been resurrected.
In 2020 Madrid and Paris imposed restrictions against the pandemic.
As of 2021, the blockades, this time decided by France, were explained by other reasons: it was about fighting terrorism and irregular immigration.
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During a recent trip from Banyuls, one of the last coastal towns before Catalonia, to Hendaye, the French-Basque city separated from Irun by the Bidasoa river, EL PAÍS encountered several blocks on the roads that forced motorists to turn around.
Near a remote mountain pass between the towns of Las Illas and La Vajol we ran into a patrol of soldiers in Renault vans: in theory they were looking for terrorists.
We verified that the cuts are a nuisance for many neighbors who for years had been moving from one place to another without realizing that one day there was a border there.
"We are neighbors, we are used to passing through, we are the same country," explains Jacques Deit, a 66-year-old retired mechanic who lives in Las Illas, the last town in France before the border between the department of the Pyrenees Orientales and the province of Girona.
"Every day I pass by here," adds Deit at the wheel of his car, and points to a dirt road that allows you to avoid the blocks that seal the precarious road, also unpaved, between France and Spain.
In the last year Paris has reopened a dozen ports that closed in January 2021
A few meters further on, in this remote corner of the Pyrenees, French soldiers await.
It is common, since the Islamist attacks of 2015, to see them patrolling in Paris or other cities;
in a bucolic and lonely landscape like this it becomes strange, as if they were out of place.
“Are you the journalist?” asks one.
Someone must have told him we were hanging around there.
When asked if they have found terrorists, he replies with a half smile: "Since we've been here, we haven't seen them."
And how long have they been here?
"A few months."
The closure of the border crossings not only annoys the towns in the area.
It also bothers the Spanish government.
“I have requested the reopening of these secondary border crossings,” Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares said in October after meeting in Paris with his counterpart Jean-Yves Le Drian.
"What I see is that, although very slowly, some are opening up."
A group of cyclists crosses the closed border crossing of Coll de Banyuls between Spain and France, in Girona.©Toni Ferragut
In December, the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, said in Congress in response to a question from Bildu deputy Jon Iñarritu: “We do not necessarily share [the French measures] because we believe that one of the fundamental pillars [of the EU ] is free movement.”
The closure of the borders is based on article 25 of the code of the Schengen free movement area, which says: “The re-establishment of internal border controls may be necessary exceptionally in the event of serious threats to public order or internal security. ”.
The objective of the closure, for the French Government, is to concentrate the police and military forces at the main crossing points and not worry about the rest.
In 2021, France rejected 41,529 people at the border, according to the French Ministry of the Interior, more than double the number in 2020, although as this was the year of the pandemic the number of undocumented immigrants was lower.
“Many people arrive, which justifies the fact that there are closed crossing points, always bearing in mind that it is not the only measure in response to this migratory flow,” says the prefect of the Pyrénées-Orientales department, Étienne Stoskopf, by phone.
The closure of small steps such as the port of Banyuls or Las Illas forces those who transport immigrants in large vehicles to take the main routes most controlled by the authorities.
"What is true", Stoskopf points out, "is that the closure of the crossing points does not prevent passage on foot, it was never intended to do so".
Bernard Gros, mayor of Enveitg, another town in the French Cerdanya that has seen its access to Puigcerdà cut off, comments: "Migrants can go through any place, they don't come by car, this is
Gruyère
cheese ."
Sign at the start of the road to the Coll de Banyuls border crossing.©Toni Ferragut
The French Government implies that, if it has been forced to partially close the border with Spain, it is because the external border of the Schengen area in Spain, Italy or Greece – the so-called countries of first entry to the EU – is not well protected .
This justifies, according to this argument, the control of internal borders in the Schengen area theoretically without internal barriers.
The French Secretary of State for Europe, Clément Beaune, declared a few days ago to EL PAÍS: "The ideal world would be a world in which the external borders of Schengen would be better protected and in which the migratory and registration rules [of the immigrants] would be better enforced, so that internal border controls would not be necessary.
In the meantime, we live with it."
And this is how, from the Mediterranean to the Bay of Biscay, to stop a pandemic, look for terrorists or contain immigration, in recent years the border has returned.
Not just here.
It happened briefly during the first lockdown in the spring of 2020 when Germany closed border roads with France, at the core of a united Europe.
Or perennially in French cities like Calais, in the English Channel, the new external border of the EU after the departure of the United Kingdom a year ago.
The journey along the 425 kilometers of the Pyrenean border began at the Banyuls pass, at the top of a narrow road through mountains punished by the north wind.
On the asphalt, a few meters from the mounds of earth and the blocks that marked the dividing line, someone wrote on the ground: "No to the Treaty of the Pyrenees."
The treaty, which established the Pyrenees as the border between Spain and France, was signed in 1659 at the other end of the mountain range and at the end of the journey, on the island of Los Faisanes, three kilometers from the mouth of the Bidasoa.
This area, between Hendaye and Irun, is a small Calais, a place where Africans who want to cross to the other shore, in this case to France, are concentrated and cannot because the bridges are fenced or there are police checkpoints.
Some, as in the English Channel, try anyway, looking for any way to get through.
In 2021, three drowned in the river.
"Passing through the border is extremely difficult, there are many controls, there are returns, arrests, and this pushes migrants who want to cross to take all the risks," says Lucie Bortayrou, from the Diakité migrant aid group in nearby Bayonne.
"Unfortunately, they try by all means, but the Bidasoa is very dangerous."
A group of migrants waits in Irun, at the border next to the Santiago international bridge, for the opportunity to cross into France, last March.Javier Hernández