The Santos Bar, across from Cordoba’s celebrated mosque, would normally be groaning with tourists tucking into its trademark Spanish tortillas.
But with the coronavirus pandemic, “everything’s dead”, the owner says.
The Mosque, an 8th-century mosque later converted into a cathedral, is the ultimate video in the Andalusian city of southern Spain.
But since its reopening at the end of May, only 16,000 more people have set foot on the UNESCO World Heritage site, considered one of the maximum completed works of Moorish architecture: the number of visitors you would get in a week.
“It will take months to make up for this,” said church spokesman José Juan Jiménez Gueto, that cash set aside in recent years means staff have been busy with recovery projects.
Restaurants, hotels and nearby places are not so lucky, and many are closed.
The Santos bar works the owner Jesús Maldonado.
Business is “a quarter of the normal,” he said. Its 10 workers benefit from a publicly funded holiday program.
The fall in tourism, a sector that accounts for 12% of the Spanish economy, will be seen as a severe blow.
While the country’s beaches are its biggest attraction, inland cities like Cordoba also attract tourists thanks to their cultural sites.
And places like Granada, Toledo and Segovia are the maximum affected, according to the National Association of Spanish Hotels, with incomes that fall by more than 50% for restaurants and bars in its historic centers.
In Andalusia, the hotel occupancy rate is on average 25%, 10% less than in coastal institutions, said Francisco de los Angeles Torre, director of the hotel association of the region.
He fears that Andalusian restaurants will have to lose up to a third of their staff.
– Non-Asian –
In Spain, the largest tourist destination in the world after France, spending through foreign tourists fell by 62% in the first five months of the year until the same time in 2019.
In Ronda, the city on top of a mountain perched on a gorge known for its stone bridge, Maria Lara Galindo has worked as a consultant for Asian tourists for the past decade.
“For those who serve Spanish tourists, there is now some activity, but Asian tourists, nothing,” she says.
While Japanese and South Korean tourists can now make a stopover in the European Union again, Galindo does not expect them to return until next summer and believes that they are likely to separate more than the groups.
Galindo is one of half a million independent workers in Spain’s tourism industry, whose federation fears that up to 100,000 people could lose their jobs.
– Quiet Seville –
In Seville, foreign tourists are nearly non-existent and even Spanish tourists few and far between.
Jordi Reines, who works as a nurse in Barcelona, cancelled a trip to Portugal to spend his time in Andalusia.
“We don’t even think about going abroad,” said Naomi Garcia, Queens’ girlfriend.
José Romero, owner of a booth that promotes drinks and ice cream in central Spain, said sales were a tenth of what they were last year.
“This year is a flood, other people don’t have enough confidence in themselves to travel,” he said.
The dozen souvenir shops near him are still shuttered.
“Uncertainty and fear are slowing everything down,” said Isabel Diaz, who is reopening her family’s fan shop after a four-month closure — something they weren’t even forced to do during Spain’s civil war in 1936-1939.
Reports of new outbreaks are keeping people from going out, added Celia Ferrero, vice president of the Association of Independent Workers.
“Spending is still under shock from the coronavirus and it will stay that way until there is a solution,” she said.
(This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text. Only the headline has been changed.)
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