It was one of the most demanded services on the Mar Menor coast. Every weekend, especially, a long line of people waited at the La Ribera pier for the ferry that connects this shore with the port of Tomás Maestre, in La Manga. Some took their bike to tour Veneziola, El Zoco and the Mediterranean beaches. The ferry service was interrupted, however, last December without explanation, despite the fact that the company that manages the routes receives a subsidy of 75,000 euros per year from the City Council to maintain the regularity of maritime transport in the Mar Menor.
This year, with the ferry out of service, the subsidy has not been paid, says the Councilor for Transport, Antonio Martínez Torrecillas, who attributes the service stoppage to “an internal company problem.”
Given the growing demand at the beginning of the tourist season, the mayor announced that three maritime ‘taxis’ will come into operation from June, with a capacity for twelve people each, to replace the ferry, which could carry 70 passengers.
These boats, of smaller length, will connect the two shores of the Mar Menor with greater frequency of trips from ten in the morning to ten at night, reports the councilor. The three ships are awaiting authorization from the Maritime Captaincy to start operating.
“Mobility in San Javier is a joke, with a bus line that does not work and a ferry service that should be much more efficient under the municipal subsidy,” says the spokesman for United We Can, Matías Cantabella, who has previously requested a regular service. The mayor denounces that it did not work on Sundays in low season.
“We are not in communication”
For the president of the Association of Entrepreneurs and Merchants of La Manga, José Luis Espinosa, “we are no longer in communication with the municipality either by land or by sea.” He believes that the City Council should have contacted other maritime transport companies so that the service would not be stopped for so long. The representative of the merchants sees in the closure of the ferry “one more symptom of the disconnection of San Javier with the district of La Manga and the neglect of the inspection function of a service that should be active.”
In Espinosa’s opinion, “cutting the only means of connection between San Javier and La Manga is one more argument for the centralization of all La Manga services in the Cartagena City Council, as Movimiento Ciudadano is already defending.”
The demand to unify the 21 kilometers of La Manga in the municipality of Cartagena has replaced the aspirations for independence that arose years ago. Espinosa wonders “what kind of belonging can you have with a municipality that you don’t go to anything or visit by chance, and on top of that you have zero transport connection.”
On the contrary, he points out that they have other ties with Cartagena, since “our children go to school, institute, university or the Santa Lucía hospital when they get sick, and they go to the movies at Parque Mediterráneo.”
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