The CEO of Cetursa Sierra Nevada, Jesús Ibáñez, stated on Tuesday that the Granada ski resort will not consider extending the season until May while there are strikes called by lift workers, whom he has called to «reason.»
Ibáñez defended that Cetursa — the public company that manages the winter resort — has given them «the maximum it can offer» and cannot go «against legality, court decisions» or act without the necessary authorizations from the bodies that govern the working conditions of the Junta de Andalucía employees.
Within what «can be done,» Cetursa and the Junta «have offered everything possible» by activating an internal promotion process in which «employment has been stabilized,» as well as providing the possibility of early departure for some workers, among other improvements, he argued in an interview on Canal Sur Television, as reported by Europa Press.
The strike committee is maintaining the mobilizations agreed upon on March 19: a total strike at the resort on April 9 and a demonstration on the same day in front of the Palacio de San Telmo; as well as partial strikes from 8:00 to 12:00 on April 12-19, during Holy Week.
With this scenario, it is «hardly» possible for Cetursa to consider extending the season until May as the sector always demands, as explained by the CEO, who has conditioned the matter to the cancellation of the strike.
He referred in this sense to the «great impact» that these strikes have — not only for Cetursa, which lost 800,000 euros in the strike on March 1 — but also for self-employed workers and businesses that depend on Sierra Nevada, both in the resort area and throughout the province and the Andalusian community, estimating the impact at six or seven million euros.
THREE METERS OF SNOW
Despite everything, Sierra Nevada, which currently has snow depths of over three meters and has almost all of its skiable area open, is confident in a «spectacular» Holy Week because, once the storms have passed, people are responding well, attracted by the quality of the snow and the good weather.
«We had a great February, a fairly good March, and we hope that this April, with this amount of snow, will be one of the best Aprils in recent years,» said the Cetursa representative, recalling that Sierra Nevada has already activated its spring campaign activities such as the Sun & Snow electronic music festival taking place this weekend or the Unicaja Ultra Sierra Nevada.
When asked about the risk of avalanches, which was very high after the recent storms, Jesús Ibáñez stated that it has decreased «significantly» and in any case, the risk has always been limited to off-piste skiing. «We are not a resort where avalanches are normal, they do occur in other European resorts mainly, but you always have to be careful and be ‘prudent’,» he explained.