- COP25.Where is Greta Thunberg?
After three weeks offshore, this Tuesday morning Greta Thunberg will disembark in Lisbon. The environmental activist refuses to use air transportation to travel from site to site, and for that reason she chose to travel on a sailboat to attend a summit at the United Nations last September, and cross the Atlantic again by boat to Announce the transfer of the Climate Summit from Santiago de Chile to Madrid.
The arrival of La Vagabonde, the catamaran on which Thunberg has moved, is expected in the Doca de Santo Amaro Lisbon from eight in the morning. The ship will reach the Portuguese capital passing west of Cabo da Roca - the westernmost point of the Iberian Peninsula - and the coastal towns of Cascáis and Oeiras until it crosses the insular fortress of São Lourenço and enters the mouth of the Tagus . Advancing with the Belém Tower on your right, you will pass under the emblematic 25 de Abril Bridge just before reaching your final destination in the Alcántara neighborhood.
The young woman will be welcomed by the mayor of Lisbon, Fernando Medina, who will be the highest authority present for the occasion. Prime Minister António Costa is already in Madrid, along with the other heads of Government participating in the Summit , and the president of the Republic, the charismatic Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, has announced that he will not attend the meeting because he does not want to steal the role of the Swedish activist.
Thunberg will give a brief press conference surrounded by other young activists who belong to his environmental movement. Although the Assembly of the Portuguese Republic had extended an invitation to address the Portuguese deputies, in the end the activist has rejected the offer because she will hardly spend 12 hours in Lisbon. Citing sources from the Thunberg team, the Portuguese press indicates that it will depart Tuesday night in order to arrive in Madrid as soon as possible.
10 hours on board the Trenhotel Lusitania
The activist's team says she will travel aboard the Trenhotel Lusitania, the night train that connects the Iberian capitals across the border at the height of Vilar Formoso and Fuentes de Oñoro. The train makes a total of 17 stops between the station of origin, Lisboa Santa Apolónia, and the Madrid-Chamartín terminal, passing through cities such as Coimbra, Guarda, Salamanca and Avila along the way.
If there are no road delays, Thunberg will arrive in Madrid at 08.15 on Wednesday after a 10-hour and 15-minute trip that unfortunately fails to meet the sustainability standards desired by the activist. And although all the routes that the train travels in Portuguese lands are electrified, the 100-kilometer stretch between the Spanish-Portuguese border and Medina del Campo is not, and there the Trenhotel depends on a diesel locomotive that produces twice the CO2 produced by electric trains.
Despite this, the activist has opted for this method of transportation instead of using the electric car offered by the Ministry of Ecological Transition and Sustainability of the Junta de Extremadura. The offer was criticized by the environmental platform Save the Mountain, which asked Thunberg to reject the offer of the car - which operates with lithium batteries - to denounce the regional decision to give a green light to a lithium mine near Cáceres. The young woman's team has not revealed whether the association's request was assessed when it was decided to opt for rail transport.
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