Shipbuilding in Spain

As part of a 12-month European project we’ve been working on for MATES we travelled to Vigo in the industrial north west of Spain to film in the local shipyards. One of the key objectives of the project was to promote the shipbuilding industry to young people across Europe and increase the number of women working in the sector. The focus of our filming during the four-day trip was to meet with and interview the shipyard managers and students working within the sector.

With Covid just hitting the news in the UK, we were fortunate to be able to complete this trip ahead of the escalating situation in Madrid. We arrived late Sunday night at the beginning of March, into a severe storm which returned our connecting flight to Madrid with increasingly bad winds moving in from the Atlantic, leaving us with no option but to make the 600km overnight drive to the Vigo for filming the next morning. Not the anticipated start to the trip we’d imagined but we arrived at the CETMAR offices to begin our 1st day with just a few minutes to spare.

We spent the first 24 hours in Vigo filming at two of the large shipyards there which manufacture a variety of vessels for Antarctic exploration, as well as Super Yachts, before heading north to Marin and Ferrol to the shipyards there and to meet and interview some of the students studying for the industry in the vocational colleges there.

Working around aerial restrictions from local Navy bases and breaks in the weather, we were able to complete a variety of filming inside and outside of the shipyards including some aerial work to give perspective on the scale of construction in progress.

Thankfully by the time we left Madrid to return to the UK the weather had settled. It was only weeks before we’d see most international travel cancelled and a full lockdown introduced across the UK.