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The Spanish government has officially commissioned public engineering firm Ineco to design the reconnaissance gallery (galería de reconocimiento) for the Morocco-Spain rail tunnel project, according to a report by Spanish news outlet Vozpópuli.
Reconnaissance gallery is an exploratory tunnel dug before the construction of a main tunnel to study and confirm underground conditions.
Vozpópuli said the formal commission was issued this month by SECEGSA (Spanish Company for Studies on Fixed Communication across the Gibraltar Strait), which reports to the Ministry of Transport.
The contract, worth nearly $1 million, establishes a detailed technical roadmap with a delivery deadline of August 2026.
The scope includes preliminary design of the reconnaissance gallery, revision of previous studies, and comprehensive updating of routing, geology, geotechnical conditions, security systems, terminals, and associated installations.
This development comes after German company Herrenknecht, the world leader in tunnel boring machines, confirmed the project’s technical feasibility in a study delivered to the Spanish government in June, the report noted.
The report concluded that despite extreme complexity, current technology is capable of executing the ambitious infrastructure project.
The 38.5km tunnel would run from a point to the west of Algeciras in Spain to Tangiers in Morocco and includes a 28km subsea section, according to an October 2025 report by International Railway Journal.
(Writing by N Saeed; Editing by Anoop Menon)
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