Almeria is far, far away

ALMERIA, by Renfe rail company’s own standards, has become the most distant land from the Spanish capital city due to a lack of progress on promised high-speed tracks.

In 2010, Renfe launched a campaign to announce inauguration of its new AVE high-speed Valencia-Madrid connection which proposed measuring the distance between two points in time rather than kilometres. The campaign boasted that Madrid and Valencia were just 90 minutes apart.

With this in mind, Almeria is located six hours and 22 minutes from the capital city which, following improvements to other lines in the northern parts of the country, has made it the most distant city from Madrid. 

The dubious privilege previously held by Pontevedra and Lugo, both almost seven hours away from the capital by train, passed to Almeria in 2016 when new rails cut half an hour of the journeys to the northern cities. 

With Santander four hours and 15 minutes from Madrid, Girona (the Mediterranean city the furthest from the capital in kilometres) just three hours and 19 minutes from the capital and even Granada, where passengers have had for the last year to make part of the journey on buses, three hours and 50 minutes from the centre of the country, Almeria has been left light-years behind.