Barcelona wakes up. It wants to be an entrepreneurial, sustainable city again, making responsible use of its resources from an economic point of view, generating wealth, structuring the territory and environmentally committed. In this vein, the Barcelona City Council, together with business and economic institutions, and through Barcelona reAct, are committed to a city that welcomes talent, is digitized, home to startups and open to the world. We cannot wait any longer if we want to remain among the great European cities as a reference for tourist, cultural and technological attractiveness. We must bet on innovation seeking balance, making decisions with a broad vision, with an essential political and social consensus that guarantees the new positioning of Barcelona and the Catalonia of the future.
To achieve this, we have two major infrastructures, port and airport, which must serve as a lever to open up to the world. The port, it seems, is well oriented, has opened up to the city and is consolidating itself as the leading cruise port in Europe. The other major infrastructure, the airport, is responsible for 6% of Catalonia's GDP and 9% of Barcelona's GDP and therefore represents a great catalyst for economic activity and employment. Its area of influence exceeds the scope of the city, metropolitan and provincial area, and its geographical position globally is one of the most attractive in the important East-West flow that is being created from Asia to America and Africa.
From 2000 to 2015, the airport doubled the number of passengers, reaching 52.6 million in 2019, with accumulated annual growth of 7.3% in the last four years. With these numbers, it was close to the design capacity limits of the infrastructure, which affected daily operations, mainly during the summer season. The growth of recent years led to scenarios far exceeding the available capacity at a key moment in the positioning of the European airport sector, in which the future of global connectivity will be played out. Therefore, the airport's situation was not the best and required decision-making and actions in the airport system(s), which are the bottleneck of airport capacity, which is defined by the capacity of the terminals (passengers/year) and air traffic management (operations/hour).
Regarding the terminals, the Master Plan already contemplates the construction of a new satellite terminal that will allow reaching 70 million people per year. However, this figure is difficult to achieve due to the limitation represented by the management of air traffic arrival and departure, due to the restrictions imposed by the use of segregated runways, that is, one runway for landings and another for takeoffs. The commitment of the airport operator to maintain the aforementioned configuration, for the benefit of the population exposed to noise (the most important impact for people from an environmental point of view), requires action on the configuration of the airfield.
Extending the runway on the sea side and improving the design of aircraft taxiing on the ground would optimize air traffic management and bring us closer to the capacity of 90 operations/hour foreseen in the Master Plan and in the Environmental Impact Statement with independent runway configuration (use of both runways for takeoffs and landings). The impact on the Ricarda wetland (protected natural area) will require significant environmental compensation that should be explored, with a balanced evaluation of all impacts, including air safety.
The development of the Catalan airport system and, specifically, the use of Girona Airport is not an alternative, but an obligatory complementarity, not only to optimize capacity, but because it is a key piece for Barcelona Airport to develop its own strategy based on its strategic positioning.
Girona Airport is prepared to offer a different airport product, well connected to Barcelona city, its metropolitan area, Vallès and Maresme, at a lower price, provided that the necessary commercial strategy is applied. Let's remember that almost all major European cities have airport systems, which allows them not only to optimize capacity, but also to have a wide range of airport offerings. Only Lisbon and Madrid lack this.
We were late, but "the worst crisis in the history of the sector" stopped mobility and everything seems to indicate that we will not recover 2019 traffic levels for another 2 or 3 years. The lifting of restrictions and the recovery of health security will activate demand and, consequently, airlines will immediately reactivate supply. Even foreseeing smaller growths, we cannot repeat past scenarios. We need ambition and broad-mindedness to define and specify what airport we want.
It is not easy, given the environment in which we operate, with important challenges, environmental commitments and political uncertainties, but it is time to take a stand. Our future is at stake and the competition is enormous.