Andorra la Vella, Andorra · Limited traffic zone
Official name Ordinació de l'1-8-2019 reguladora de l'accés de vehicles a la zona de vianants de l'avinguda Meritxell i àrea d'influència, en el tram comprès entre el carrer de la Unió/carrer del Valira i el carrer Bonaventura Armengol/avinguda del Consell d'Europa
In force in Andorra la Vella right nowTuesday, 13 October 2026 at 11:05 · Europe/Andorra
The 08:00-to-11:00 loading window is deliberately not encoded as an hour when the restriction lifts. It belongs to article 8.2 and to the cross-streets only — de la Borda, Prat Primer, Sant Salvador and the adjoining stretch of Bonaventura Riberaygua — it is a permission to load for up to twenty minutes on working days, and article 8.1 bans delivery access to the pedestrian avinguda Meritxell itself at every hour. Encoding it as a window would tell an ordinary driver the capital's main street is open at 09:00, which is the opposite of what the ordinance says.
The restricted hours in article 4 are not a public timetable and are not encoded. They are whatever the Junta de Govern writes into the individual authorisation, which it may issue for a different access, time or stopping period than the one applied for. The single figure the article does fix is the fifteen-minute maximum for a vehicle bringing a sick person to an address or treatment inside the zone.
This encoding says when the restriction is in force, not where you are. The perimeter is not held as geometry — see boundary coverage — so the warning is at city level, and inside the parish a driver still has to read article 1's street list and the signs at the entries. Article 23.2 of the 2018 enabling ordinance requires pedestrian-priority zones to be signed at entry and exit, and allows movable elements to be placed to prevent or control vehicle access.
No public-holiday rule is encoded. The ordinance refers to 'dies laborables' for the loading window without defining them, names no holiday, and no Andorran holiday calendar is held in this corpus. Inventing an exemption would be worse than having none.
Operating times only, read from the source below. It does not check your vehicle.
The commercial spine of Andorra's capital is closed to vehicles outright, and the rule is as short as rules get: in the stretch of the avinguda Meritxell between the carrer de la Unió/carrer del Valira and the carrer Bonaventura Armengol/avinguda del Consell d'Europa — plus the carrers Babot Camp, de la Borda, Prat Primer, Sant Salvador and the stretch of carrer Bonaventura Riberaygua as far as the carrer Verge del Pilar — driving and parking are prohibited, permanently, for every type of vehicle.
There is no charge, no emission class and no hour at which the street reopens to traffic. The ordinance defines 'vehicle' broadly enough that the ban catches things a driver might not think of as one: every one-, two-, three- and four-wheeled vehicle, motorised or not, and explicitly bicycles, skates, skateboards and anything analogous.
Three categories are exempt outright, and they are statuses rather than payments — single-seat wheeled vehicles specifically adapted for people with reduced mobility, the fire service, police and ambulances on duty, and the Comú's own service vehicles.
Four more categories may enter, but only on restricted hours and dwell time and only with the Comú's authorisation: drivers of parking spaces inside the zone in buildings authorised before the zone was created and with no other way in, who may drive through to reach the space but may not stop in the public space; service vehicles for building works or services in the zone where the cross-streets will not do; vehicles carrying sick people to an address or a treatment inside the zone, with a fifteen-minute maximum stop that the Servei de Circulació may check; and anyone else who applies with a justification and is granted a comunal authorisation by the Junta de Govern.
Enforcement is automatic and named in the act itself: the Comú may run number-plate recognition cameras that feed a control centre at its own Servei de Circulació, and article 9 provides that infringements are penalised either directly by comunal traffic officers and public-way inspectors or through the sanctioning procedure on the strength of the recorded images.
Deliveries have their own arrangement and it is a refusal rather than a window: goods may not be brought into the pedestrian part of the avinguda Meritxell at all, and must be loaded and unloaded from the car parks or from the bays laid out for it in the adjoining streets. Only on the side streets named in article 1 is there a clock — working days, 08:00 to 11:00, twenty minutes maximum, on the circuits the Comú sets.
The authority to do all of this comes from the Comú's own general ordinance on civic coexistence of 27 September 2018, whose article 23 lets it declare zones with pedestrian priority in which circulation and parking of all types of vehicle are wholly or partly restricted, and whose article 91 fixes what the driver pays for being in one without the right to be.
Butlletí Oficial del Principat d'Andorra (BOPA) núm. 67, any 31, 6 d'agost del 2019, section 10. Comú d'Andorra la Vella / Ordinacions i reglaments — the Principality's single official gazette, which publishes the acts of the Govern, the Consell General and all seven comuns in one series. This is the operative text of the zone ordinance, approved by the Consell de Comú on 1 August 2019 and signed by the cònsol major and the secretari general
There is no daily charge in this scheme, and that was measured on the text rather than assumed from its shape. The ordinance is nine articles plus two closing provisions and it contains no price, no tariff, no fee and no occurrence of the word euro at all.
Nothing in it can be bought: the two ways past article 2 are both statuses — being one of the three exempt categories in article 3, or holding a comunal authorisation under article 4 — and article 7, which sets out how to apply for that authorisation, lists what the applicant must supply and names no payment among them.
The applicant must justify the need for access, say whether it is permanent or one-off, propose a route, an access time and any stopping time, give the plates so they can be validated in the control system, and in the resident case prove title to the parking space. Five requirements, no amount.
Andorra la Vella does sell access to the public way in a different ordinance — the Ordinació del 19-6-2025 reguladora del servei d'estacionament de vehicles a la via pública, which governs paid on-street parking across the parish — but that is a parking scheme and not this zone, and folding its prices in here would invent an entry charge the Comú has not set.
'Free' is deliberately not claimed either: the ordinance is silent on what, if anything, a comunal authorisation costs, and silence is not a zero. Not estimated.
The ban has no hours, and that is the answer rather than a gap in our reading. Article 2 prohibits circulation and parking of any type of vehicle in the streets defined in article 1 'amb caràcter permanent' — permanently — and names no hour, no weekday and no season at which the prohibition lifts. A driver arriving at 04:00 on a Sunday is in exactly the same position as one arriving at midday on a Tuesday.
The 2016 ordinance this one repealed did work by the clock, restricting traffic only during the hours of heaviest pedestrian flow, and the 2019 preamble says in as many words why that changed: the avinguda Meritxell was rebuilt during 2018 with restricting vehicle circulation permanently as one of its stated priorities. So the absence of hours here is a deliberate replacement of an hours-based rule, not an omission.
Two clocks do run inside the scheme and neither opens the zone. The first is for authorised vehicles: article 4 admits its four categories only 'en condicions d'horari i permanència restringits' — on restricted hours and dwell time — and the actual hours are whatever the Junta de Govern writes into the individual authorisation, which the article expressly allows it to set differently from what was asked for.
That is a per-permit timetable rather than a public one, so no window is encoded for it. The one fixed figure is the fifteen-minute maximum stop for vehicles carrying sick people to an address or treatment inside the zone.
The second clock is for goods, and it applies only outside the pedestrianised avenue: loading and unloading in the carrers de la Borda, Prat Primer, Sant Salvador and the stretch of carrer Bonaventura Riberaygua adjoining the avinguda Meritxell as far as the carrer Verge del Pilar is limited to working days, from 08:00 to 11:00, for a maximum of 20 minutes, following the circuits and instructions the Comú lays down.
Inside the pedestrian part of the avinguda Meritxell itself, article 8 bans delivery access altogether at every hour. No public-holiday rule is encoded: the ordinance names none, it says 'dies laborables' without defining which days those are, and no Andorran holiday calendar is held in this corpus.
Butlletí Oficial del Principat d'Andorra (BOPA) núm. 67 del 6 d'agost del 2019 — Ordinació de l'1-8-2019, articles 2, 4 and 8. The permanence is article 2's own word; the delivery arrangement is article 8, which bans access for goods to the pedestrian avenue and then sets the side-street window
The zone is a street list, and article 1 gives it in one sentence. The core is the stretch of the avinguda Meritxell between the carrer de la Unió/carrer del Valira at its western end and the carrer Bonaventura Armengol/avinguda del Consell d'Europa at its eastern end.
To that the 2019 ordinance adds what it calls the àrea d'influència, and this is the part that changed: the carrers Babot Camp, de la Borda, Prat Primer and Sant Salvador, and the stretch of the carrer Bonaventura Riberaygua adjoining the avinguda Meritxell as far as the junction with the carrer Verge del Pilar.
The preamble explains why those streets are in: during 2019 the embellishment and traffic-calming works continued off the avenue into them, with the stated aim of favouring movement on foot in this commercial quarter of the capital. The 2016 ordinance this one repealed covered the avinguda Meritxell alone, and only during peak pedestrian hours, so both the extent and the clock were widened at once.
Two things about the extent are worth a driver's attention. The first is that a second pedestrian zone is bounded by the same named junction.
The Comú d'Escaldes-Engordany, in the neighbouring parish, closes a stretch of the avinguda Carlemany under its own ordinance — the Vivand zone, which this corpus holds as a separate record — and it bounds that stretch at the carrer de la Unió/carrer del Valira, in exactly the words this ordinance uses for the western end of its own.
This corpus does not hold the geometry to prove the two areas touch on the ground and does not claim it; what the two acts say is that two adjoining parishes have each pedestrianised their end of the same commercial axis and drawn the line at the same named junction. They are two zones made by two authorities, and the authorisation that gets a driver into one is not the authorisation for the other.
The second is that the ordinance regulates the streets it names and nothing wider: the parish of Andorra la Vella is far larger than this, and the rest of it is ordinary traffic subject to the Principality's Codi de la circulació and to the Comú's parking ordinance.
The perimeter is not published as geometry by anyone — see boundary coverage — so the list above is the extent, and the signs at the entries are what a driver actually reads.
Butlletí Oficial del Principat d'Andorra (BOPA) núm. 67 del 6 d'agost del 2019 — Ordinació de l'1-8-2019, article 1, and the preamble's account of the 2018 rebuilding of the avenue and the 2019 works in the adjoining streets. The repeal of the narrower 2016 ordinance is the act's own disposició derogatòria
The authority's own map: Comú d'Andorra la Vella
There is no emission standard for a petrol vehicle in this scheme, because there is no emission standard in it at all, and that was measured rather than inferred: the full text of the ordinance was read and searched for emissió, contaminació, CO2, gasolina, dièsel, gasoil and Euro, and the count is zero. What article 2 reads off a vehicle is nothing — it bans every type.
What articles 3 and 4 read is who is driving and why: a mobility-adapted vehicle, an emergency service, a comunal service vehicle, a resident with a parking space inside the zone, a works vehicle, someone carrying a sick person, or a holder of a comunal authorisation.
A brand-new electric car with no permit is barred and a forty-year-old petrol van belonging to the Comú's own services is admitted, which is the clearest demonstration available that exhaust is not the test here.
The enabling ordinance behind it is headed 'convivència ciutadana, medi ambient i higiene' and does carry environmental provisions, but its chapter on pedestrian-priority zones — articles 23 to 26 — turns on signing, speed, pedestrian priority and the list of exempt services, and sets no emission condition either.
Not estimated: this is a statement about what the published text does not contain, and it is a statement about these two ordinances rather than about Andorra, where no national low-emission-zone framework was found in the gazette.
Nor a diesel standard, and for the same measured reason: the words dièsel and gasoil do not occur in either ordinance, and the question the rule asks is who you are and whether you hold an authorisation, never what you burn. Nothing in the text separates diesel from petrol, sets a Euro floor, asks for a smoke-opacity result or refers to a windscreen label.
The only vehicle properties the 2019 ordinance grades anything on are the kind of vehicle — it defines the term widely enough to catch bicycles, skates and skateboards — and, for the authorised categories, the errand. Not estimated.
Butlletí Oficial del Principat d'Andorra (BOPA) núm. 57 del 2 d'octubre del 2018 — Ordinació del 27-9-2018 reguladora de la convivència ciutadana, medi ambient i higiene de la parròquia d'Andorra la Vella, títol VIII, article 91, the table of infringements and amounts. Article 9.3 of the zone ordinance sends the driver here in as many words: infringements are sanctioned in accordance with this ordinance and processed under the sanctioning-procedure ordinance of 22 December 2016. The table's block headed 'Circulació en zones amb prioritat per a vianants' lists three articles — 23.3, 24 and 25 — and prices every one of them at 50 €, so the figure does not depend on which of them a given entry is charged under. Article 89 grades it: all infringements under this ordinance are lleus (minor), a repeat within two years is charged at double, and an infringement after the first repeat at triple. The chain was followed to its end rather than stopped early — the sanctioning procedure ordinance sets the process, not the amount, and the amount is here
Butlletí Oficial del Principat d'Andorra (BOPA) núm. 67 del 6 d'agost del 2019 — Ordinació de l'1-8-2019, articles 1 to 8: the perimeter and the definition of vehicle (art. 1), the permanent ban (art. 2), the outright exemptions (art. 3), the authorised categories and the fifteen-minute medical stop (art. 4), the 10 km/h and shortest-route conditions (art. 5), the camera system (art. 6), the five things an application must contain and the Junta de Govern's power to grant something other than what was asked (art. 7), and the delivery arrangement (art. 8). The 50 € and its doubling come from the enabling ordinance of 27 September 2018, articles 89 and 91
Butlletí Oficial del Principat d'Andorra (BOPA) núm. 67, any 31, 6 d'agost del 2019, section 10. Comú d'Andorra la Vella / Ordinacions i reglaments. The BOPA is the Principality's single official gazette and publishes the acts of all seven comuns alongside those of the Govern and the Consell General, which is why one publisher satisfies both denominators here. This is the operative text of the zone: nine articles, a disposició derogatòria that expressly repeals the narrower Ordinació del 21-7-2016, and a disposició final putting it in force the day after publication. Its own in-force evidence is the absence of any successor: the gazette's full-text index, searched across the whole corpus and not only this comú, returns no later act amending or replacing it
Butlletí Oficial del Principat d'Andorra (BOPA) núm. 57, 2 d'octubre del 2018 — Ordinació del 27-9-2018 reguladora de la convivència ciutadana, medi ambient i higiene de la parròquia d'Andorra la Vella. This is the enabling act and the price list in one document. Títol I, capítol quart, articles 23 to 26 is the power: the Comú may establish zones with pedestrian priority in which the circulation and parking of all types of vehicle is wholly or partly restricted, such zones must be signed at entry and exit, the speed limit inside is 10 km/h with pedestrian priority, the restriction may be permanent or by hours or days, and emergency services, transport of the sick, access to authorised garages and holders of a comunal authorisation are outside it. Títol VIII, article 91 is the amount, and article 89 the graduation. Its two amendments were read and neither touches this: the Ordinació del 3-8-2021 modifies article 22.2, in the bicycle chapter, and the Ordinació del 29-12-2025 modifies article 7, on queues outside restaurants
Next scheduled re-check: 2027-09-17.