Spain reimposes passport checks on travellers arriving from Italy
From midnight on Saturday 8 August until 7 September, Spanish ports and airports are running random identity and passport checks on passengers coming in from Italy. Non-EU residents are the ones who will be stopped.
Anyone routing home through Spain from Italy over the next few weeks should budget for a stop that was not in the plan. On Friday 7 August the Spanish government decided to temporarily restore border controls at ports and airports for passengers arriving from Italy. The measure took effect at midnight on Saturday 8 August and is set to run until midnight on 7 September.
Officers are checking identity and passports, and asking third-country nationals for a visa or residence permit. The checks are random rather than universal, so not every passenger on every flight will be pulled aside. Madrid also left itself room to move: the end date can shift if the circumstances behind the decision change.
How it got to this
This is the second half of a standoff. Last week it was Rome suspending the Schengen Agreement for flights and sea links out of Spain, citing security and migratory pressure at the Spanish enclave of Ceuta — the decision we walked through when Italy started checking arrivals from Spain.
Spain then gave Italy three days to drop the controls or face what it called proportional measures. The Spanish government’s official communiqué is unusually blunt with Rome. It points out that Ceuta has a special status inside Schengen, so nobody who crossed irregularly into the city could move freely through the common area anyway, that almost all of them have already returned to Morocco, and that on Frontex’s own numbers it is Italy, not Spain, that has logged the most irregular crossings in recent years. Giorgia Meloni’s government refused the ultimatum and said its selective screening of non-EU passengers stays until at least 15 August.
What it means if you are travelling from Portugal
Direct flights between Portugal and Italy are untouched. The Spanish checks apply to people entering Spain from Italian territory, so the affected traveller is the one flying Rome or Milan with a Madrid or Barcelona connection on the way to Lisbon or Porto, or crossing by sea.
If you hold an EU passport, the worst case is a few extra minutes. If you live in Portugal on a Brazilian, Angolan, Indian, Ukrainian or any other non-EU passport, you are precisely the profile that gets checked, however impeccably legal your status is. Carry the passport and your Portuguese residence card, and if all you have so far is the paper proof of application, bring that too. Then give the connection more slack than the airline suggests, because a random check in a packed August terminal takes longer than the schedule assumes.
Image: Diego Delso / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
