EU Grant awarded for Santander - Portsmouth Ferry route

 

The European Commission has awarded a grant worth 5.6 million Euros to Brittany Ferries in order to encourage the increase of traffic between the ports of Santander in Northern Spain and Portsmouth in the UK.

Another route from Vigo in Galica and the French port of Nantes-Saint Nazaire, was awarded a smaller grant worth 1.2 million Euros.

The grant means that the company can now run a Ferry service between northern Spain and the UK three time per week.

The so-called Marco Polo II project is an initiative of the European Commission to encourage sustainable freight using Europe's rail and sea routes, thereby controlling congestion and pollution. Marco Polo aims to free Europe's roads of an annual volume of 20 billion tonne-kilometres of freight, the equivalent of more than 700 000 trucks a year travelling between Paris and Berlin.

Of the 101 applicants for the grant, 32 projects to date have been successful, sharing funding of almost 57 million Euros in total.