Spanish Frigate Completes Its Deployment As A NATO Command Ship

SPANISH Frigate ‘Cristóbal Colón’ Completes Its Five Month Deployment As A NATO Command Ship

The Spanish frigate ‘Cristóbal Colón’ has just ended its five-month deployment in Mediterranean Sea where it formed a part of NATO’s permanent SNMG-2 maritime group, as Spanish vessels have done for the last 30 years.

Docking at Pier 5 of the Ferrol Arsenal, having previously disarmed at the A Graña naval base, also in the Ferrol estuary, the vessel – originally built in the Navantia shipyard in that same city – had set sail on November 3 to the Greek port of Souda, where it relieved the frigate ‘Álvaro de Bazán’, also based in Ferrol.

During this exercise, the interoperability capacity of the ships integrated into a multinational force will be tested under a multiple threat scenario, including exercises involving ballistic missile detection and tracking, as well as the defence against anti-ship missiles using real missile launches.

The Cristóbal Colón’s captain, Juan Bautista Payá Martínez, looks after a crew of 220 men and women, including a Marine Corps security operational team and an SH-60B helicopter, as reported by moncloa.com.