Road Tolls In Portugal Cut by 50-75% In July

The A22 reaches the Algarve. Image: Pexels

Road tolls will be 50 per cent cheaper in Portugal this month, and could be up to 75 per cent cheaper for drivers of electric cars on the A22. The decision to reduce road tolls has been taken to boost domestic tourism.

As of July 1, all tolls will be half price and on the A22, which crosses the Algarve and is known as the Via Infante, the tolls will be reduced by 75 per cent for electric cars and other non-polluting vehicles.

The government of Portugal has faced repeated criticism for increasing the cost of road tolls which earn as much as 160 million euros every year.

The toll on the A22 came into force in December 2011. The closure of the border between Spain and Portugal as a result of the Covid pandemic has meant losses of between 40 per cent and 50 per cent in cross-border commercial activity in the province of Huelva alone.

As restrictions eased, on June 9 Spain was forced to apologise for asking people who travelled from Portugal by land to produce a negative test for Covid-19, certificate of vaccination or recovery of the disease.

The move “could only have been a mistake,” Portugal’s foreign minister Augusto Santos Silva said.

The border between Portugal and Spain opened on May 1 after three months of travel restrictions.


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Deirdre Tynan

Deirdre Tynan is an award-winning journalist who enjoys bringing the best in news reporting to Spain’s largest English-language newspaper, Euro Weekly News. She has previously worked at The Mirror, Ireland on Sunday and for news agencies, media outlets and international organisations in America, Europe and Asia. A huge fan of British politics and newspapers, Deirdre is equally fascinated by the political scene in Madrid and Sevilla. She moved to Spain in 2018 and is based in Jaen.

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