A reflection on two decades of collaboration between Portugal and the Escola Europea

There is a common misconception in logistics: that connectivity is built with infrastructure. Ports, railways, terminals, shipping routes – they matter enormously. But after more than twenty years working in transport and education, I have come to believe that the most important connections are built between people.

That is why it is impossible to tell the story of the Escola Europea without talking about Portugal.

For two decades, Portugal has been more than a neighbouring market or a strategic partner. It has been a genuine travelling companion – in the literal sense, too. Some of our earliest collaborations grew out of the Marco Polo programmes and initiatives such as MOST Portugal and SURCO Portugal, which aimed to promote short sea shipping and open new approaches to freight transport. Looking back, their most lasting achievement was less visible: they built a community.

A community of port managers, logistics professionals, public officials, and educators who discovered that working across borders produced better results than working alone. Many of those who joined those first programmes are now running companies, shaping policy, or training the next generation. The impact has kept travelling.

The People Behind the Projects

No partnership of this scale is built by institutions. It is built by individuals who decide to commit to something.

Antonio Belmar was one of those people during the formative years of our collaboration — someone who could bring the right stakeholders into the room and get things moving. Antonio Nabo Martins, first at CP and later at APAT, became another key figure in anchoring the relationship over time. And alongside them, many others: Eduardo Bandeira, Thiago Fernandes, Vítor Caldeirinha, Luís Cacho, Isabel Moura, João Carvalho, João Soares — professionals and lecturers whose contributions rarely make it into official records but have shaped everything we have built together.

Learning by Going

Some of my strongest memories from this collaboration come from the field: visiting Portuguese ports during Port2Rail, or riding the rail corridors of northern Spain with SURCO Portugal participants. These were demanding programmes, and deliberately so. You cannot really understand intermodality from a classroom. You have to see how a decision made at one terminal ripples through operations hundreds of kilometres away.

That conviction — that logistics has to be experienced, not just taught — remains at the centre of what we do.

What Has Held This Together

Twenty years is a long time in any sector — long enough to see funding programmes come and go, institutions restructure, and market conditions shift several times over. What has sustained the relationship with Portugal through all of that is not a formal agreement or a shared budget. It is trust. Trust allows organisations to share knowledge rather than guard it. It allows professionals to learn from each other without competition getting in the way. And it allows projects to survive the disruptions that any long-term collaboration will inevitably face.

Looking Ahead

Today, programmes like MOST Iberia and Port2Rail continue to bring together professionals from both sides of the border. The sector has changed — sustainability has moved from a nice idea to a strategic imperative, new technologies are reshaping operations, and AI is beginning to alter how logistics decisions are made. The questions are more complex than they were in 2005.

But the foundation is stronger, too. Twenty years of shared work means a network of people who know each other, trust each other, and have already proven they can collaborate effectively across borders.

That is the kind of infrastructure that does not appear on any map — but it may be the most important kind we have built.