The South executes the largest number of road works in its history to end a delay of decades

The south of Tenerife is currently carrying out the largest number of road works in its history. They are a set of large infrastructures underway, with million-dollar investments, which aim to put an end to mobility problems caused by the lack of foresight of public administrations for decades in the face of runaway population growth as a result of the tourist boom.

The complaints that mayors, businessmen, workers, residents and tourists have expressed for decades have been extinguished as excavators, cranes and tractors have set to work in different points of a region that registers, in certain sections of its network road, traffic rates that are among the highest in Spain.

The Canary Islands Government has awarded this year the drafting of the different sections of the 55 kilometers of the third lane (one more in each direction) of the South Highway (TF-1), between Güímar and Playa de Las Américas. The forecast of the Ministry of Public Works is that in March the drafting of the construction projects will be completed. Adding these kilometers of third rail to the 24 existing between Santa Cruz and Güímar, the TF-1 will have three lanes in each direction along 80 kilometers.

The last tender, approved last July and endowed with 505,460 euros, was for the 10-kilometre stretch between San Isidro (Granadilla) and the link to Oroteanda (San Miguel) through which more than 65,000 vehicles circulate daily and in which the current links cause retentions that extend to the trunk of the highway, with frequent traffic jams between San Isidro and Las Chafiras.

A month earlier, the department headed by Sebastián Franquis put out to tender, for 1,955,632 euros, the drafting of the longest section of the third rail, between Güímar and San Isidro, a 34-kilometre work that will improve the safety of this high-speed road. capacity that connects the Valle de Güímar industrial estate (the largest in Tenerife in occupied area) with the port of Granadilla, of general interest to the State and with significant growth forecast in the coming years.

More than 50,000 vehicles, many of them trucks, circulate daily along this section, with the particularity that most of the traffic is concentrated at the beginning and end of the working day: between 07:30 and 09:00 and between 15:30 and 5:00 p.m. south and north, respectively. The planned work will affect 13 junctions, 12 bridges, 11 underpasses and the Güímar tunnels.

Last June, the Ministry of Public Works also put out to tender, for an amount of 549,114 euros, the drafting of the third lane project on the Oroteanda-Playa de Las Américas route, nine kilometers long, the segment of the TF -1 with greater traffic saturation, through which more than 90,000 vehicles circulate daily, generating kilometric traffic jams in the bottlenecks around Guaza and Los Cristianos.

The location of the Hospital del Sur, in El Mojón (Arona), makes it necessary to study different alternatives that allow the incorporation of direct accesses to the hospital, both from the Los Cristianos junction and from Playa de Las Américas, in order to improve the Connection.
This action will reach the mouth of the cut-and-cover tunnel between Playa de Las Américas and Fañabé (already outside the third rail section). In May, the Ministry of Public Works put out to tender for 107,222,750 euros the drafting of the project and the execution of the works jointly, in order to shorten the usual administrative processes and start the work more quickly.

With this work, which will be carried out on three kilometers of key highway to alleviate traffic congestion, the highway will be buried with a cut-and-cover tunnel that will begin at the height of the National Police station and will end just before the center Gran Sur commercial area, while the upper part will become a four-lane boulevard with landscaped areas, bike lanes and four roundabouts that will allow traffic to be diverted between the two sides of Playa de Las Américas, as well as towards Torviscas and Fañabé. The term of execution of the works is 45 months from the signing of the award contract.

Meanwhile, work continues on the Las Chafiras-Oroteanda junction, which forms part of the San Isidro-Playa de Las Américas section and includes the conditioning of the TF-1 carriageway between both junctions for the future third lane. They have a budget of 21,797,785 euros and an execution period of 30 months, and are concentrated between kilometer points 62,040 and 64,540 of the motorway and on nearby roads.

The new Las Chafiras junction will be in the form of an elevated roundabout on the trunk of the TF-1, with two circular overpasses and a connection with the TF-65 road, which connects the urban area of ​​San Miguel and Los Abrigos. It will be possible to circulate towards Santa Cruz through two branches and two collector-distributor roads will be enabled in the south direction.

Once the Oroteanda roundabout, with its four branches, has been completed, the construction of the elevated roundabout that will replace the current bridge at the Las Chafiras junction has intensified. Work has already begun with the concreting of the pillars in the trunk of the highway that will support the flown roundabout, similar to the one built in San Isidro. A new access and a roundabout will also be created in the lower part of Las Chafiras, parallel to the highway, to improve flow in one of the densest traffic hubs in the South.

The work is complex, not only because of the volume of traffic but also because of the amount of electrical conduits, public supply pipes and the channeling of purified water to Valle San Lorenzo. The forecasts of the Ministry of Public Works placed the conclusion of the works at the end of the year, although some setbacks, among them the processing of a modified project to include the hydraulic corridor of the Cabildo, have delayed the works until 2023.

But the star performance, due to the complexity it represents, is the Erjos double tunnel, a central element and iconic construction of the Insular Ring. As DIARIO DE AVISOS reported last week, robotic excavators have already drilled three kilometers of the Teno massif of the 5.1 planned to build the largest tunnel in the Canary Islands and one of the longest in Spain.

The robots advance faster in the two parallel mouths opened in Santiago del Teide (southern section), where they have drilled 2,000 meters -with an average of 50 meters per week- than in El Tanque (north section), where they have excavated a kilometer in each of the tubes, where progress is made 25 meters per week due to the greater difficulties presented by the terrain. These data indicate that 60% of the tunnel has already been drilled and, if the Ministry’s forecasts are met, the four mouths will be in the “proximities” of summer.
The map of major road projects in the South is completed with the construction of the second 14.5-kilometre lane between Las Manchas (Santiago del Teide) and Erques (Guía de Isora), in a west-south direction. Public Works has already awarded the drafting of the project. The tender budget is 987,687 euros.