High-speed route
AVE
Madrid → Barcelona · Spain
- Distance
- 621 km
- Fastest time
- 2 h 30 min
- Average speed
- 248 km/h
- Top speed
- 300 km/h
- Operator
- Renfe
- Train
- S-103 Velaro E
- Countries
- Spain
- In service since
- 2008
- Runs
- 2–3× hourly; ~35 daily each way across three operators
- Riders per year
- ≈ 9M
Figures are published values, not live data · corrections log
Scheduled at 310 km/h, Europe’s fastest timetable, this line flipped one of the world’s busiest air routes to rail.
The AVE crosses the empty heart of Aragón in a straight, confident line: wind farms, ochre mesas and the Ebro at Zaragoza, where the Pilar basilica’s towers slide past the window. Liberalisation brought Ouigo in 2021 and iryo in 2022, and the three-way fare war has turned a once-premium dash into everyday transport. Non-stop services stitch Spain’s two great rivals together in two and a half hours, door to door through city-centre stations the airlines cannot match.
How this line was checked
- Line drawn from OpenStreetMap relation 309363 — the same nodes OpenStreetMap holds for this railway, thinned to within 25 m of them
- Checked against OpenStreetMap: the whole line lies on real track, a median 7 m from it
- The operator publishes this line's timetable: Renfe — a place to look it up, not a check of our drawing
- Wikipedia has an article for this line
Along the way
- Guadalajara’s red plains
- Zaragoza’s Basílica del Pilar
- Aragonese steppe wind farms
- Camp de Tarragona vineyards
- Barcelona Sants beneath the Eixample
More high-speed routes
- Eurostar
Drops 75 m below the sea through the 50.5 km Channel Tunnel, 37.9 km of it under the seabed, the longest undersea stretch of any rail tunnel.
Wikipedia ↗ - TGV inOui
France’s original 1981 LGV forms the first leg; today the TGV holds 320 km/h nearly all the way to the Mediterranean.
Wikipedia ↗ - AVE
Spain’s first AVE, built for Expo ’92 in standard gauge, the line that reset Spanish railways.
Wikipedia ↗ - ICE Sprinter
The €10bn VDE 8 project: 26 tunnels and 37 viaducts through the Thuringian Forest halved the Berlin–Munich journey.
Wikipedia ↗
More train routes in Spain.
Planning this trip? Journey time & direct trains: Barcelona → Madrid · Madrid → Barcelona.