Spain and Portugal for Visitors

Posted by : John Ross on Dec 19, 2006 - 11:25 AM railways

The Lerida-Tarragona stretch of the Madrid-Barcelona AVE high-speed railway connection was opened yesterday. However, the AVE will initially run at a top speed of 200 km an hour on this section, far from the intended operating speed of 350 km/h. This comes only four days after the inauguration of the Córdoba-Antequera section of the Madrid-Málaga line. Read more, unless you would like to go to the Spain and Portugal for Visitors Railways page.

The AVE should reach both Málaga and Barcelona in 2007, and by 2009 should reach the French border.

At the opening of the Lerida-Tarragona line, President of the Generalitat (Catalan government) José Montilla (as reported by El País) made the very valid point that the new AVE network structure is broaching the "competely obsolete radial model." I say that largely because that "radial model" is something I have complained about frequently, though I suppose I had better explain what it means. Spanish transport planners have always seemed to have this logic: the more important a place is, the more likely people are to want to go there, so, for example, everyone must want to go to Madrid. This has applied to all travel infrastructure in the country - roads, railways, even bus lines - and in the past has meant that it has often been impossible to get from A to B without making a detour to Madrid, or at least two provincial capitals you didn't really want to visit, even when A and B are withing shouting distance of each other across a provincial boundary.

A look at the map of AVE lines under construction shows how much things are changing. Galicia, for example, is to get its own AVE network, connecting La Coruña, Vigo and Orense, the Basque Country will be similarly communicated, while the Mediterranean Corridor will supplement the AVE to the south of Catalonia.