After six years of work, the new port of Calais (Pas-de-Calais) is finally inaugurated this Thursday, September 9. The culmination of a project imagined almost twenty years ago.
About 400 people are expected to participate in the inauguration ceremony, in the presence of the mayor of the city, Natacha Bouchart, but also of the president of the port Jean-Marc Puissesseau, and of the president of the Hauts-de-France region, Xavier Bertrand. If Emmanuel Macron was also invited to the event, the ceremony does not seem to be on the agenda of the Head of State, according to information from The voice of the North. His predecessor, François Hollande, went to the site in 2016, to symbolically lay the foundation stone.
A 3.3 km long dyke, a new basin of 90 navigable hectares, and three new ferry terminals have thus been built. About twenty buildings have also been erected, which will house some of the new duty-free shops, absent for more than twenty years, according to France 3 Hauts-de-France. The port will also be able to accommodate more modern and larger ferries, 240 meters long.
The “Calais port 2015” project (when it was to be delivered, then finally to which work began) was imagined in 2002 by Jean-Marc Puissesseau, while he was working at the Chamber of Commerce and Calais industry. In 2015, he left this position to take over the management of the Strait Ports Operating Company.
An inauguration against the backdrop of the migration crisis
The work, estimated at more than 863 million euros and which mobilized nearly 3,500 employees, aimed to extend and modernize the port to respond to the increase in cross-Channel traffic. Despite Brexit and the health crisis, the port of Calais remains one of the most important in Europe. According to the Hauts-de-France region, it is even the first in continental Europe for passenger transport (10 million per year, before Covid) and the 4th French freight port (43 million tonnes of freight per year). The managers of the port of Calais hope for a 40% increase in traffic by 2030.
The site was supposed to end last January, but with the health crisis, the work was delayed. After the inauguration of this Thursday, it will be necessary to wait until October 4 for the commissioning of the port. Regularly, migrants try to enter the port of Calais. Last May, nearly a hundred refugees had thus tried to access the boats, going so far as to cut a fence and installed dams on the port bypass. A truck driver was also injured. In the context of the Afghan crisis, Boris Johnson, the British Prime Minister, announced about three weeks ago that he wanted to welcome some 20,000 Afghan refugees. This announcement came as many migrants from all walks of life have been waiting in Calais for a long time to reach the English coast. On August 21, at least 828 migrants even crossed the Channel to the United Kingdom, which was a new daily record.