It began to be reported as a regional airport, yes, with international flights, a private initiative and with a modest initial investment, but in a few weeks it jumped into the race for the future Lisbon airport solution.
It was the need to find a location more than 75 kilometers from Lisbon, the radius that grants ANA exclusivity in the concession contract, that led the promoters of a new airport to land in the municipality of Santarém. And it was also this condition that pushed it to a place never before thought of, because it is far from Lisbon, but which has advantages to the point of having convinced the Government to include it in two of the five options that the independent technical commission will evaluate. The Infrastructure Minister, Pedro Nuno Santos, said that it is a hypothesis with “merits” that does not identify and justify its consideration with “relevant” information that reached the Government.
One of the advantages of the Santarém option is that it is well served by the access infrastructure —highways and rail network— that already exists or is planned in other projects.
The site studied is located between the two main transport infrastructures in the country, the A1 motorway and the Northern Line, which are only a few kilometers apart. This location allows, through a short dedicated extension, to carry out a shuttle train that, at 200 kilometers per hour, takes passengers to Gare do Oriente in half an hour. To do this, it has the additional capacity that will be created by the already planned quadrupling of the line in this region and which was reaffirmed in the framework of the Porto-Lisbon high-speed line project.
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Source: Observadora
