Train tunnel to link Europe and Africa?

TARIFA, Spain — Engineers have dreamt of it for a quarter-century: linking Europe and Africa at the spot where the two very different worlds gaze at each other across a strip of choppy water.

Now, after seemingly endless studies that turned up more than one nasty geological surprise, a project for a high-speed rail tunnel connecting the continents is gathering momentum, raising the prospect of an engineering marvel on par with the Panama Canal or the Channel Tunnel between Britain and France.

This tunnel would bore deep under the Strait of Gibraltar, the narrow waterway where the Atlantic flows into the Mediterranean, and run from Tangier, Morocco to the Spanish town of Tarifa at Europe's southernmost tip. -name European engineering consultants brought in a few months ago are to complete a feasibility study this year.

"I think this project is a utopia that is becoming a reality," said Angel Aparicio, president of the Spanish government agency overseeing the endeavor with Moroccan partners.

Aside from fueling economies on both sides of the strait, planners are excited by the symbolically powerful feat of bridging two continents as far apart socially and culturally as they are close geographically.

But the technological challenges are mammoth: A test tunnel dug outside Tarifa a decade ago, for instance, unearthed a smorgasbord of soils, some on the mushy side, hardly the right stuff for anchoring such a grand structure.

The cost is unofficially projected to run over $13 billion for the 22-mile tunnel and engineers say it would take about 20 years to construct. Spain and Morocco hope to receive European Union financing if the project gets under way.

There's also the issue of whether that economic chasm between Europe and Africa would doom the tunnel as a white elephant. Planners wonder whether Africa is too poor to provide a sustained, profitable flow of people and goods on the northbound leg of a tunnel.

Even the popular Channel Tunnel opened in 1994 has accrued debt and the company operating it, Eurotunnel, received bankruptcy protection from creditors last year. The costs of digging that 30-mile undersea rail tunnel were massively underestimated, and traffic predictions proved optimistic.

Still, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said last month he is fully committed to the Strait of Gibraltar project. Planners hope the Europe-Africa tunnel will create "an integrated Euro-Mediterranean economic area" and be more than just a way to cross the strait, a journey now done by ferry.

They envision a day when train tracks from the tunnel would stretch as far south in Morocco as Marrakech and allow for travel time just a fraction of what it is now.

Morocco's tourism industry, which the government has marked as a key economic motor for the future, would benefit from a tunnel.

"Tourist flows will accelerate because people will be able to come with their own transport. For now, the need to cross by boat presents a psychological and practical barrier," said Tajeddine el-Husseini, professor of international economic law at Mohamed V University in Rabat. (Travelers' vehicles could be loaded onto trains, as is done in some European tunnels.)

For decades the Strait of Gibraltar was a dangerous and often deadly conduit for Africans seeking to reach Europe, as people packed small, rickety boats to try to reach Spain and gain a toehold on the wealthy continent. Because of a Moroccan security crackdown, these journeys are now attempted further west from the Western Sahara and Mauritania.

Ferries that sail across the strait are not known to be a major lure for stowaways, so an extremely high security rail tunnel would probably not contribute either to the flow of desperate Africans trying to reach Europe.