Pas-de-la-Case (Andorra) (AFP)

Duty-free alcohol and cigarettes, petrol or even washing powder ... Thousands of French people rushed at dawn to the Pyrenean principality of Andorra, which opened its borders and shops on Monday, asphyxiated by more than two months of confinement.

"At four in the morning we were already crowded. People are ready to do anything for cigarettes!", Laughs at the border post an Andorran policeman, checking the identity documents of four young people in their twenties years.

In the middle of the morning, the winding mountain road leading to Pas-de-la-Case, the first Andorran town after the border, looked like a holiday, blackened by hundreds of cars over ten kilometers.

The authorities of the small state in the Pyrenees massif have estimated the arrival of about 6,000 vehicles from the nearby surroundings, the limit of 100 kilometers for travel has not yet been lifted in France.

At 11 a.m., they were around 5,000 to have crossed the border, according to Jean-Michel Rascagneres, the deputy mayor of the parish of Encamp, to which the Pas-de-la-Case is attached.

"Express tourists" making the round trip in a few hours and bending in a good mood to all the health security measures put in place.

- "Queen of laundry" -

Wearing a mask and compulsory hydroalcoholic gel at the entrance to stores, single direction of traffic on the sidewalks, snowmen painted on the ground to enforce the 1.50 m space between people ...

"All that reassures me," says Éléonore Ducros, 76, from Ariège, a neighboring French department, buy cigarettes with his friend and drink his first coffee on the terrace in two months.

In a café-restaurant, Carmel Alcaraz enjoys a beer and a plate of fries. "We live again, we needed it so much!" She exclaims.

This regular from Pas-de-la-Case left early on this holiday, "but we still did two hours on the road, against one usually". In his bags, no alcohol or tobacco, but cleaning products.

"I am the queen of laundry, I love the laundry sold here, which comes from Spain," says laughing this sixty-something, confident to be able to make the trip once a month to get it.

The sellers of Pas-de-la-Case, for whom French tourists represent more than 95% of buyers during the summer period, are also in a good mood behind their mask. "Finally we work, we could not stay at home, it was either we opened or we jumped from the balconies," says Arnaud Monségu, liquor seller.

- "This other Andorra" -

The Covid-19 epidemic has suffocated the Andorran economy, which depends mainly on cross-border trade and tourism, causing unemployment to soar and threatening the 78,000 inhabitants with a severe recession.

While prices are already much lower than in France, many traders who display on their windows discounts of 20, 30 or even 50%.

"We have advanced the sales because the merchants have a lot of stocks," said AFP Jean-Jacques Carrié, president of an association of merchants in Pas-de-la-Case.

But to revive the economy of this small state already very fragile even before the epidemic and which will not benefit from the European recovery plan, because not being part of the European Union, the Andorran government wishes to attract beyond this type of consumers.

"The territory has 90% of nature, and it is this other Andorra that people do not often know that we also want to highlight", explains the Minister of Tourism Véronica Canals.

© 2020 AFP