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CORDOBA, Spain: Santos Bar, unlike the famous Mosque of Cordoba, groaned with tourists who entered their Spanish tortillas. But with the coronavirus pandemic, “everything is dead,” the owner says.
The Mosque, an 8th-century mosque that later became 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.
At the Santos Bar, only owner Jesus Maldonado is working.
The business is “a quarter of (what) normal,” he said. Its 10 workers benefit from a publicly funded holiday program.
The plunge in tourism, a sector that accounts for 12 per cent of Spain’s economy, will be felt like a body blow.
While the country’s beaches are its biggest draw, cities in the interior like Cordoba also attract tourists with their cultural sites.
And places like Granada, Toledo and Segovia are the maximum affected, according to the National Association of Hotels of Spain, 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 emissions than in institutions along the coast, said Francisco de los Angeles Torre, head of the region’s hotel association.
He fears that Andalusian restaurants will have to lose up to a third of their staff.
NO ASIAN TOURISTS
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 to it was 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 following 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 stopovers in the European Union again, Galindo does not expect them to return until next summer and believes they are most likely to do so separately than in groups.
Galindo is one of 500,000 independent employees of the Spanish tourism industry, whose federation fears that up to 100,000 more people will lose their jobs.
SEVILLE IN CALM
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 off 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 washout, people aren’t confident enough to travel,” he said.
The dozen souvenir shops near him are still shuttered.
“Uncertainty and worry slow everything down,” said Isabel Díaz, who reopened her family’s fan shop after a four-month closure, something they didn’t even have to do in the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939.
Reports of new epidemics are preventing others from leaving, said Celia Ferrero, vice president of the Autonomous Workers Association.
“Spending remains the surprise of the coronavirus and will remain so until there is a solution,” he said.
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