Spain Opens to Overseas Tourists in June

Spain plans to reopen to foreign tourists in June under the Covid digital health certificate program, according to the country’s secretary of state for tourism.

The scheme, which allows visitors to demonstrate they’ve been vaccinated, tested negative, or recently recovered from the virus, would be “fundamental to offering travelers certainty,” according to Fernando Valdés, who spoke at the World Travel & Tourism Council summit in Mexico on Tuesday.

Spain will engage in a pilot digital credential scheme in May, according to Valdés, and will be “able to welcome visitors in June.” He described the new scheme – as well as Spain’s vaccine rollout – as a “before and after” in contrast to last year’s situation, but emphasized that the certificates were “not a magic wand.”

What they did give, he said, was a sense of security because they would encourage visitors to travel if they had been vaccinated, if they had tested negative despite not having received the vaccine, or if they had already recovered from Covid, according to comments published by the Spanish news agency Europa Press.