The Almaria Chamber of Commerce sat in emergency session Thursday in Almaria Vella, summoned by word that a major northern trading bloc intends to impose duties of up to twenty-five per cent on Mediterranean motor vehicles as early as next week. The assembly plant in the Cordoba industrial quarter, which employs some nine hundred hands in finishing and export crating, stands directly in the path of the measure.

Senhora Dolors Puigcerdà, economic adviser to Cardenal Marín and a familiar figure on the steps of the Commerce Hall, spoke for the delegation that emerged after three hours of closed discussion. "We are monitoring the situation with grave concern," she told reporters. "Almaria cannot absorb such a blow without consequences for our workers." The phrasing was careful; the faces behind her were not.

The Herald understands that the Foreign Ministry has dispatched a diplomatic note requesting urgent clarification from the bloc's trade attaché. Officials in the Palau de la Generalitat would not confirm the text of the note, but two persons familiar with its drafting describe it as firm in tone and narrow in scope — a request for time, not a protest.

The Cordoba quarter has a longer memory than the ministries that govern it. The assembly works were rebuilt in the 1960s on the site of the old Cordoba foundry, and the payrolls have passed through three generations of the same families in Sant Joan and the Bloc del Puerto. A twenty-five per cent duty, traders on the Exchange floor estimated on Thursday afternoon, would erase the plant's margin on its principal export contract within a single quarter.

The matter now travels three corridors at once: the Commerce Hall, which will reconvene Monday; the Foreign Ministry, which awaits a reply; and the Chamber, where the fuel reserve already occupies the Government's Monday sitting. Prime Minister Blanch, attending a civic ceremony in Cordoba, did not address the tariff question directly.

The House of Cordoba, whose industrial holdings include the assembly works' principal landlord, issued no statement. A person close to the estate described the patriarch as "attentive" to the Commerce Hall's proceedings and disinclined to speak before Monday. That, too, is a position.