The Operation Passage of the Strait (OPE) 2026, named Marhaba by the Moroccan authorities, starts on June 15 with the mandatory implementation of the Entry/Exit System (EES) of the European Union, a novelty that has required the doubling of the usual devices at the ports of Algeciras and Tarifa. This was stated on Thursday by the president of the Port Authority of the Bay of Algeciras (APBA), Gerardo Landaluce; the General Secretary of Civil Protection and Emergencies of the Ministry of the Interior, Virginia Barcones, and the deputy delegate of the Government in Cádiz, Blanca Flores, before presiding over the meeting of the Provincial Director Committee of the OPE.
Landaluce pointed out that there are more than 750 people involved in the human device of the APBA, including personnel from the operations area, port police, and temporary hiring. The planned infrastructure includes more than 13 docks — eleven in Algeciras and two in Tarifa — for both ro-pax and ro-ro traffic. The port president quantified the ordinary economic effort at 2.2 million euros in spending and 600,000 euros in investment, to which is added the expenditure linked to the EES: "we are practically talking about fourteen million euros for the devices and also for support and reinforcement personnel for the implementation of the Entry/Exit System," he noted.
For her part, Virginia Barcones recalled that this is the thirty-sixth edition of the OPE and that it marks forty years since the Ministry of the Interior took over the coordination of the operation in 1986. The previous edition closed with a historical record of 3.5 million people, 850,000 vehicles and 12,000 rotations, a figure to which the Bay of Algeciras accounts for around 70-75%. For 2026, the forecast is a growth close to 3% in both passengers and vehicles, after the Algeciras port grew last year above the average of the whole.
The main operational novelty is the mandatory application of the European biometric control, based on facial recognition, fingerprints, and passport reading. Barcones specified that the first registration requires a few additional seconds, while the subsequent steps are resolved within seconds. The community regulation provides the possibility of temporarily suspending the system for periods of six hours — extendable if circumstances persist — a decision that corresponds to the National Police when waiting times compromise the safety of the operation. In that case, traditional passport control would be resumed. As an additional measure, the deputy delegate of the Government may decree the interchangeability of tickets between shipping companies if conditions so advise.
