Road and rail infrastructure that crosses countries and even continents are just as important for turning the world into a village as the development of passenger aircraft, and as people become more mindful of flying it will become even more critical.
This is part of the reason why a tunnel through the Strait of Gibraltar that connects Europe to North Africa has become a particular fascination, and why feasibility studies into the costs for construction equipment, conveyor belts and tunnelling machinery have piqued the interest of a lot of different organisations.
How possible is a cross-continental rail tunnel, how much would it cost, how long would it take and why is it being talked about with increasing urgency now?
The Mediterranean Tunnel
Whilst the Channel Tunnel crosses the Strait of Dover/Calais, the proposed Strait of Gibraltar crossing would connect Spain and Morocco via the narrowest point of the neck which connects the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean.
Much like how the Channel Tunnel was a century in the making before it finally was constructed, there have been proposals as early as 1930 to build a tunnel under the Strait of Gibraltar.
However, a major problem with this was that the incredibly hard rock at the base of the Strait made tunnelling impossible using the tunnel-boring machines available at the time. This led to the then-novel approach of sinking and fixing a prefabricated tunnel to the floor of the Strait, although this also went nowhere.
The other big problem is depth; whilst the Strait of Dover has an average depth of just 46m (150 feet), the Strait of Gibraltar has a maximum depth of 900m (2,953 feet), three times the depth of the deepest underwater tunnel in the world.
Norway’s Ryfast tunnel has a depth of 292m (958 feet), which means that the Strait of Gibraltar crossing will need to either be designed to handle conditions three times deeper than the deepest tunnel ever placed or needs to be moved elsewhere.
The most likely location for such a tunnel is the Camarinal Sill which is roughly 280m (919 feet) deep, which would extend the tunnel from nine miles long (14km) to up to 21 miles (34km).
This is far from the only issue, however. There is a major geological fault line which has led to multiple earthquakes throughout the Strait of Gibraltar. This has significantly complicated any potential design, but it does not make such a project necessarily impossible.
The first serious moves towards a Strait of Gibraltar Crossing began in 1979 with a declaration signed by the kings of Morocco and Spain, although it would take until 2003 until serious work would begin on preliminary designs, feasibility studies and ways to manage the major complexities of the project.
The proposals were revived in 2023, and whilst initial proposals expected the construction to take 15 years, there is a major push to try and complete it in less than six, but what has created the sudden push to revive a transport project mired in feasibility issues?
Six Countries, Three Continents, One Beautiful Game
The sudden push to revive the Strait of Gibraltar tunnel project is most likely related to the somewhat unusual decision to award six countries across three continents the hosting rights to the 2030 FIFA World Cup men’s football tournament.
Three matches will be held in South America, in Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguay, as part of a centennial celebration of the inaugural tournament. The bulk of the tournament will take place in Spain, Portugal and Morocco.
There are a lot of transport links between Spain and Portugal, given that they are on the same continent and landmass, making it easy to move from one country to another.
However, Morocco is on another landmass and another continent, meaning that an alternative to a deluge of flights and ferries is required to make the tournament feasible.
As well as this, Morocco had completed the first high-speed railway line in Africa: the Al Boraq line between Tangiers and Casablanca.
The idea, therefore, is to connect this to the Spanish High-Speed Rail network, which uses the same gauging and would ultimately mean a line between Casablanca and Madrid, via Tangier in Morocco and Algeciras in Spain.
Whilst the revived project is promising, it would cost at least £5.1bn, it would be constructed to an incredibly tight timeframe for a tunnel of this scale and whilst £2m has been invested into feasibility studies, time is quickly running out to make a decision on whether it would be ready in time for kick-off.
