Less than a month after the southern tunnel was opened, an explosive charge on Monday night symbolically linked the two work faces of the northern tunnel and completed the excavation work.


The deadlines for the project point towards completing the work by the year’s end and it should be opened to traffic in the first quarter of 2016, six years after the work began, but it was delayed because of hold ups, bankruptcies and political changes of mind.


The longest road tunnel in the Iberian Peninsula has 580 workers at the moment and the project has progressed with “a very low number of accidents and no deaths Infraestruturas de Portugal (IP) said