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The Portuguese government ordered the closure of the border with neighboring Spain from Friday due to the extremely high number of corona infections.
For initially two weeks, the limit may only be crossed in emergency situations, as Interior Minister Eduardo Cabrita announced according to the media on Thursday in Lisbon.
During the first Corona wave in the spring of last year, the common border was closed for months.
It was only reopened on July 1st due to the sharp decline in corona numbers.
According to Prime Minister António Costa, the corona situation is "very bad".
On Thursday, 16,423 new infections and 303 more corona deaths were registered in the country with 10.3 million inhabitants.
That was a high since the pandemic began.
Extrapolated to Germany, this would correspond to around 130,000 new infections and around 2,400 deaths within 24 hours.
The health system is extremely overloaded, especially since there are fewer beds in intensive care units in relation to the number of inhabitants than in Germany.
The government estimates that the proportion of the presumably more contagious Sars-CoV-2 variant from Great Britain in the greater Lisbon area already accounts for around 50 percent of all new infections, as the newspaper "Público" wrote.
The federal government declared the holiday destination, which is also popular with Germans, to be a high-risk area last weekend, which should make traveling to the country even more difficult.
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