According to the tourist sector of the Costa Tropical, quite a lot, which is why they want the A-44 rechristened to Autovia de la Costa Tropical.
Back in 2009 the then Minister of Public Works (Fomento), José Blanco, promised that the autovia from Bailen (Jaén) to the coast would bear this new name. And yet, even though both the PP and PSOE approved this name change, the Congreso, the Ministerio de Fomento still considers the matter “under consideration.”
What the local tourist sector wants is to quite literally put the Costa Tropical on the map, because many Spaniards outside Andalucía probably couldn’t situate the name correctly – they’d probably think that it is somewhere on the Central American coastline. After all, if you’re heading south on an autovia called Costa Tropical then there little doubt where it lies – every motor-way signpost is an advert for the coast.
For years the Costa Tropical hotel associations, chiringuito associations and the town halls themselves have been nagging Madrid to change it. But the stumbling block, Fomento considers, is the cost of changing all the signposts between Bailén and Motril, as well as all the national highway maps.
Originally, the pro-Costa Tropical crowd had only asked for the section between Granada and the coast, but the administration in charge of national highways said that you could only have one name for the whole lot, and as it starts at the Bailén junction, from Bailén it had to be.
When Minister José Blanco announced at the opening ceremony of the Ízbor-Vélez section of the A-44 in 2009 that the road was to be called Costa Tropical, everybody gathered applauded enthusiastically – he even joked at the time that he hadn’t expected a name to be so important.
Besides, he pointed out, the norm is for roads to be named after the place where they end, not where they begin or through where they pass.
The PP, now that they are in power in Madrid, appear to have lost their appetite for the idea, however, and the PP run Mancomunidad de la Costa Tropical can only come up with the idea of calling it the Autovia de Sierra Nevada, heading north, and Costa Tropical, heading south…
(News: Costa Tropical)