La Via Augusta del segle XXI

"Give me a train and a map and I'll tell you a story," begins this journey that Josep V. Boira proposes during the European Year of the Railway, when ten years ago the European Union declared the Mediterranean corridor a strategic project. Until then, it was little more than a dream, a hypothesis, an idea in academic papers, a historicist update of the old Via Augusta or a peripheral bet on alternative economic discourses. The geographer Josep V. Boira reviews the rugged trajectory of the Mediterranean corridor, from the long effects of the peninsular decision to have a different track width from the rest of Europe to the current situation. The ominous decade (2002-2011) and the luminous decade (2011-2021) are analyzed, with such antagonistic protagonists as José M. Aznar, Eliseu Climent, Loyola de Palacio, Ana Pastor and Artur Mas. It addresses political projects such as the Euroregion of Pasqual Maragall or the Mediterranean regionalism of a certain right, proposals that oppose the tougher centralist model.