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Date Published: 07/05/2021

ARCHIVED - Spain on UK amber travel list; blow for those who had booked Spanish trips for first week of June

ARCHIVED ARTICLE

The UK government has announced which countries are on its green, amber and red lists for travel this summer.

<span style='color:#780948'>ARCHIVED</span> - Spain on UK amber travel list; blow for those who had booked Spanish trips for first week of June

The UK government announced last month that it would introduce a ‘traffic light’ system setting out the restrictions in place for travelling to different countries when international movement re-opens on May 17, and today (Friday May 7), Secretary of State for Transport Grant Shapps announced that Spain is currently on the UK’s amber list.

Travellers flying back to the UK from Spain will have to quarantine for 10 days, or five days if they take a negative PCR test on day five.

The politician said that the government’s Joint Biosecurity Centre will review the list every three weeks, taking into account factors including each country’s infection rate and level of vaccinations, meaning that Spain could be moved to the UK’s green list when rates improve.

The ‘Stay in the UK’ regulation will lift on 17 May, meaning leisure travel from England will no longer be illegal. However, speaking at a No10 press conference this afternoon, the Transport Secretary outlined how strict border control measures will remain in place as international travel gradually resumes.

"Our priority remains to protect public health, which is why the ‘green’ list is currently very small, with only 12 countries and territories. As the epidemiological situation improves worldwide, it is expected that there will be more opportunities for leisure travel with a greater number of destinations added.

In total, 12 countries and territories have been added to the green list including Portugal (including the Azores and Madeira); Australia; New Zealand; Singapore; Brunei; Iceland; Faroe Islands; Gibraltar; Falkland Islands; and Israel and Jerusalem.

Mr Shapps said:

"Today marks the first step in our cautious return to international travel, with measures designed above all else to protect public health and ensure we don’t throw away the hard-fought gains we’ve all strived to earn this year.

This is a new way of doing things, and people should expect travel to be different this summer – with longer checks at the borders, as part of tough measures to prevent new strains of the virus entering the country and putting our fantastic vaccine rollout at risk."

As expected, countries with high infection rates including Brazil and South Africa are on the UK’s red list.

Travellers to green list countries from the UK will have to take a Covid test before and after coming back into the country, while passengers to amber list countries will have to quarantine at home, and those to red list countries will have to quarantine in a government hotel for 11 nights.

Currently, travellers from the UK are not allowed into Spain unless they are residents or for certain other reasons until at least May 31 after the Spanish government last month extended restrictions on British travellers so the allocation of Spain to the "amber list" makes little difference for the remainder of the month, although it will affect all those who have booked flights for the first month of June in the expectation that the restrictions of the Spanish government would be removed and had hoped that Spain would be listed as green.

Spain's ministry of tourism said the decision would have no immediate effect but reiterated "its conviction that this summer it will be possible for British citizens to spend their holidays in Spain" and predicted that in June "we will be able to start the reactivation of international travel".

The tourism sector has been brutally hit in Spain since the pandemic began, the latest tourism figures for March released this week illustrating the financial blow Spain has suffered; Just 18,000 British nationals travelled to Spain during March compared to 1.5 million in March 2019.