FCC, the Citizen Services Group, has strengthened its leading position in Central America with two new contracts: construction of access roads for the Mina de Cobre project in Panama and widening of the Interamericana Norte highway in Costa Rica.

The contracts together represent revenues of 100 million euro, of which 93 million euro correspond to the Mina de Cobre project. FCC now has more than 2 billion euro in contracts in Panama.

Mina de Cobre is 120 kilometres west of Panama City and 20 kilometres from the Caribbean coast. Construction will be completed in 19 months. This contract is part of the Cobre Panama project, currently under construction, in which a world-class copper mine in Colón province is being developed, with a potential mine life of 30 years.
Investment in the project totals more than 4 billion euro (around 5 billion dollars), making it the largest private investment in Panama's history. This project is headed by Minera Panama, S.A., a subsidiary of Inmet Mining Corporation, a multinational based in Canada.

FCC's construction subsidiary in Central America will build a 6.6-kilometre access road connecting the mine with the facilities on the coast. It will also build two additional roads: one providing access to the mine from the east (1.5 kilometres) and a second running parallel to the principal pipeline (5.5 kilometres).

FCC has been operating since 1996 in Panama where it now has a backlog of more than 2 billion euro including this new contract. The company's most emblematic projects currently under way in Panama include the construction of line 1 of the Metro, which will be the region's first underground railway; the Hospital Complex mega-project, for 440 million euro; the Luis Chicho Fábrega Hospital; and the new access channel to the Panama Canal from the Pacific Ocean.

Expanding in Costa Rica
FCC also landed a contract to build eight bridges on the Norte Interamericana highway in Costa Rica. This contract (worth slightly more than 6 million euro) is especially important because it is part of the project to extend the Cañas-Liberia road in Guanacaste (northwest Costa Rica, around 280 kilometres from San José), which FCC is currently undertaking, for 75 million euro.

The bridge building contract has an execution period of 17 months. This project will be financed by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), with an initial packet of infrastructure funding (IDB I) totalling 235 million euro (300 million dollars).

As in Panama, FCC also started operating in Costa Rica in 1996, with road maintenance contracts and projects in rural areas. It also participated in the country's most important road project: the concession to build the 77-kilometre road linking the capital, San José, with Caldera, on the west coast. FCC also built the 12-kilometre highway linking Alajuela and Heredia, west of San José.