Portuguese government make assurances that testing capacity will meet demand
Portugal is set to reopen to UK investors who test negative for coronavirus on Monday, despite the country extending a national emergency until the end of May as it continues its recovery from the third wave of the pandemic.
The confirmation comes just a week after the British government added Portugal to its “green list” of countries to which UK citizens are able to travel to from 17 May without needing to isolate upon their return.
The Portuguese government confirmed in a statement on Friday that Brits will be allowed to enter the country from midnight on Monday.
The statement read: “This decision will revoke the essential travel restrictions, that [are] in place until 16 May. Any person entering Portugal will have, in any case, to have an RT-PCR test done 72 hours before departure.”
The statement also made reassurances that there will be adequate capacity for testing to match the demands of tourists, while thousands of people have been trained as part of an initiative to keep the country safe.
João Fernandes, the president of the Algarve Tourism Board, told The Guardian that he welcomed the decision. “It’s really important because the UK is our main market and there isn’t the concern about the [health] risk because they have the best pandemic indicators,” he said.
“We have hotel groups that have seen more bookings in this past week than in a whole month in a normal year,” said the association’s president, Elidérico Viegas.
“The UK is not just any market for us; it’s our most important supplier of tourists and so having a aerial corridor between the UK and Portugal – and the Algarve specifically, which is the preferred destination for British visitors – brightens the outlook for hotel and tourist business owners.”
Airlines, and companies such as Rolls-Royce, that depend on the industry will be keeping a close eye on how things unfold in Portugal in the hopes that more major holiday destinations will open.
