This announcement comes as a tremendous blow, both for British residents in Spain who haven’t been able to see their families in the flesh since this all began, as well as for Brits with property in Spain who can’t get over here to check on what condition their holiday homes are in after standing empty for so long.
“Whilst the British Government wants to see the safe return of international travel, we have decided that given the risk posed by variants of concern, and to protect the progress that the UK has made on vaccination rollout, we need to maintain strict border measures and testing requirements.
This means that only a very limited number of countries (12) have been categorised as green in our new traffic light system. We are removing the stay in the UK restrictions from the 17th of May, but the UK government has said that people should not be travelling to red or amber countries for leisure. Spain has been categorised as an Amber country.
The amber rating in the traffic light system means that anyone who does travel to Spain will need to quarantine at home upon arrival in England, alongside stringent Covid testing, as now.
In any case, Spain does not currently permit tourism from the UK due to Covid entry restrictions. At the moment, only residents and those with “essential reasons” may enter Spain.
The UK government has used a number of important factors to make the decision on the rating of each country for the traffic light system. This includes vaccination rates, infection rates, the prevalence of variants of concern, the robustness of data and the extent of genomic sequencing to identify variants.
The announcement today is a first step in the UK’s cautious return to international travel. We will review these measures every 3 weeks. As the epidemiological situation improves worldwide, the UK government expects that more destinations will be added to the green list.
And we will of course, continue discussing these issues with the travel industry and with Spanish stakeholders. For further information, please see the following this link.”
(News: Spain)