Spain is a country that seems to want to confine train trips to the rest of Europe to the past. Generations of Spaniards grew up with the image of the famous Lusitania, the night train with daily service between Madrid and Lisbon, and over the last two decades, travel across the continent with Interrail tickets has grown fueled by the Erasmus spirit. However, the Lusitania stopped circulating in 2020 and it is rarely a neighbor or friend, and not a young student, who tells us one of those stories full of the mystique of the traveler who moves by train through old European cities. There is a reason for this: traveling from Madrid to Lisbon requires about nine hours and two transfers for just over 600 kilometers. Barcelona has direct trains to Paris, but the duration is almost seven hours.
Spain's western European border quality is often alluded to to explain its poor cross-border rail connectivity. However, the current energy emergency generated by the attack by the United States and Israel on Iran shows that what we accept as logical is a structural vulnerability of our country. Unless the global influence of petro-States is reduced, crises such as the Strait of Hormuz will be repeated, compromising the availability of flights and their low cost. Not only our vacations are in question; also the capacity of resistance to external shocks of the tourism sector, which represents 13% of the national GDP. Today the railway infrastructure cannot absorb even a small part of the international tourists who visit Spain.
The high-speed plan that Europe is currently discussing may, however, work in Spain's favor. In the draft presented, the European Commission has proposed completing high speed in Extremadura and the Basque Y so that you can travel between Madrid and Lisbon in three hours and between Madrid and Paris in six. The additional financing necessary to complete these works would come from the new European budget, whose allocations for these and other cross-border railway projects the Commission proposes to double. The Spanish Government must be fully involved in the coming months to guarantee that this is the final minimum amount, since the negotiations will conclude at the beginning of 2027.
Likewise, the Executive must demand that a second European initiative, the one linked to improving the reservation of international tickets, an action on which coverage for delays and cancellations in turn depends, be strengthened as much as possible. The European Commission proposed in May that the websites and applications of Renfe and other European national operators sell international trips, but limiting the obligation to those services originating or ending in their countries. It is vitally important, however, that the geographical scope of this requirement be raised so that users of popular trips such as Barcelona-Milan or Madrid-Brussels can easily find tickets for these routes and their rights are protected. A recent survey showed that up to 61% of long-distance travelers had given up on taking a train at least once due to obstacles or uncertainties during the process.
Spain cannot waste the happy moment that the train is experiencing in Europe. Several railway companies are already launching long-term services to connect their capitals. The German Deutsche Bahn and the French SNCF have already launched one that connects Berlin and Paris in eight hours. Germans, Danes and Czechs have begun to operate another between Copenhagen and Prague via Berlin. There are also plans to connect the German capital with Oslo and Rome. These routes draw on travelers between intermediate cities rather than on point-to-point travelers, which demonstrates the growing interest of passengers in the train as a means of transport between large European cities. In Spain, Renfe made a series of announcements in 2023 committing to create direct lines Madrid-Lisbon, A Coruña-Lisbon and Madrid-Oporto by 2027. Since then nothing has been heard.
If the Government is truly committed to the decarbonization of transport and sustainable tourism, it must assume the European high-speed plan as a strategic priority and design a roadmap that promotes and facilitates new services. It should also require that a greater number of international routes be bookable from the websites and applications of Renfe and its European counterparts as a way of supporting mobility by train instead of by plane. Tourism less dependent on aviation is equivalent to a more resilient, greener and better connected Spain with the rest of the continent.
