Spain suggests talks with UK might lead to islands being excluded from quarantine rule

Government announced on Saturday that anyone entering UK from Spain would have to isolate for 14 days

Spanish officials say they are in talks with the UK government about making the Canary and Balearic Islands exempt from newly imposed Covid-19 quarantine rules.

The UK government on Saturday announced that anyone entering the country from Spain would be required to self-isolate for 14 days.

The policy – announced just hours before it came into effect on Sunday - plunged the holiday plans of thousands of Britons into chaos.

Current guidance advises against all non-essential travel to mainland Spain, but the Canaries and Balearics are exempt from the de facto travel ban.

However, anyone visiting any part of Spain – including the islands – is currently required to self-isolate for a fortnight when they return to the UK.

“There have been conversations since the weekend with the British authorities about dropping quarantine for those visiting the islands as soon as possible,” Spain’s tourism minister, Reyes Maroto, said on Monday.

Maroto also said the government was providing the UK with epidemiological updates about each of Spain’s 17 regions, adding that six of them were currently in a better epidemiological situation than the UK.

“We’ll be talking to all the Spanish regions to see what they propose, and any proposals will be brought to the British authorities,” she added.

Spain has recorded 39.4 cases of Covid-19 per 100,000 inhabitants over the past two weeks, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).

For comparison, the UK and France both have a figure of 14.6 infections per 100,000 residents, ECDC figures show.

José Ramón Bauzà, a Spanish MEP and former president of the Balearics, said the country does not “understand the decision of the British government” because the islands have far lower coronavirus rates than the UK.

Most areas of Spain have “very good numbers and the situation totally under control”, he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

“It doesn’t make sense that in a country as big as Spain is that there is a total veto for the whole country when there are just some local problems in some specific regions,” he said.

Health minister Helen Whately said the government was right to introduce the new rules and that more restrictions could follow.

“What we said throughout the time when we’ve put in place the policy on the travel corridors, the air bridges, is that we would need to keep those under review, that we would need to monitor the rates in other countries,” she told Today.

“That is exactly what we’ve done in Spain, so we are enacting the policy that we committed to doing.

“The rate was going up very rapidly in Spain and we had to take very rapid, decisive action.”