The island administrations yesterday gave a decisive step to end the retentions on the southern highway TF-1: the opening to traffic of two of the four branches of the Oroteanda link, a roundabout and a connection through an underground gallery under the highway that connects this roundabout with the one already in use. It is a vital action to decongest one of the points of the TF-1, located in the municipality of San Miguel de Abona, whose high traffic density –a daily average of 75,000 vehicles– causes bottlenecks. Although the work has not yet been completed, the opening of the two branches and the roundabout will now facilitate connections with the commercial and industrial area of Las Chafiras, improve security and shorten travel.
The Minister of Public Works of the Canary Islands Government, Sebastián Franquis, clarified yesterday in a visit to the works that “this is not an inauguration, but the partial opening to circulation of the new Oroteanda link.” This link is part of a larger project carried out by the regional Executive called Third lane of the TF-1, Las Chafiras-Oroteanda link. “We are putting into service several branches of this new link in the public interest,” explained Franquis. The time savings in this new link, he added, can be between 35 and 45%. “It is a very important action because it takes place in one of the traffic hotspots in Tenerife.”
Franquis was accompanied yesterday on his visit to supervise the work by the president of the Cabildo de Tenerife, Pedro Martin; the vice president and insular councilor of Public Works, Enrique Arriaga; the mayor of San Miguel de Abona, Arturo González; and the director of Road Infrastructure, José Luis Delgado. The opening will allow drivers coming from Adeje, Guía de Isora, Las Américas or Los Cristianos (Arona), and heading to Las Galletas, Guargacho and Costa del Silencio, have an alternative route that leaves the highway to join the roundabout that has been in use for a year. The other branch that comes into service is the one that connects the new roundabout with the highway in the direction of Adeje and that will facilitate the exit towards the TF-1 to those who come from Las Chafiras or Aldea Blanca. This new link will unload traffic from Las Chafiras, the only one in the area that until yesterday absorbed all the vehicles that intended to access or leave Las Chafiras or towns such as Las Galletas, Guargacho and Costa del Silencio.
With the other two branches that will open in January, the new Oroteanda roundabout will be completed. From then on, work will focus on the remodeling of the Las Chafiras junction. The forecast is that the complete work could be in operation definitively at the end of 2022 or the beginning of 2023. The president of the Cabildo de Tenerife, Pedro Martín, stressed that this work “had to have been carried out 15 years ago”. “Not only had it not been done, but it also had no project, a circumstance that happens to us in other parts of Tenerife,” Martín added. The island president pointed out that this roundabout «It will allow connecting the lower part of the Las Chafiras area with the upper part and it will open a new connection in the direction of schools, to relieve a good part of the flow that often accumulates at the entrance to the industrial zone “, which translates into” undoubted progress “.
Pedro Martín highlighted that «Government of the Canary Islands and Tenerife Council they will continue working together to give a boost to works that are still pending in the south and north of Tenerife ”. For his part, the vice president of the Council of Tenerife and Minister of Roads, Enrique Arriaga, pointed out that “Tenerife is 20 years behind on roads” and that in this mandate “there has been a truly important change: close coordination between the Government of Canarias and the Cabildo de Tenerife to launch many projects that had not been developed for more than 15 years.
The project includes this new link in Oroteanda, the remodeling of the current Las Chafiras link, the construction of two high-capacity collector routes for rainwater, a connecting promenade between the Gomero roundabout and the Las Chafiras Industrial Park, which has already been completed, and the fitting out of a platform capable of housing the future third lane of the TF-1.
