Canfranc
Understand
This rather small village would be a perfectly un-notable community in the Pyrenees mountains if it hadn't been chosen in the 1920s as the the site of a Spanish-French border station. Among other things, it served as a point where Nazi gold was delivered from Vichy-France to Franco-Spain. It was also the main transshipment point for war-critical tungsten from officially neutral Spain to Nazi controlled Europe. However, an accident in the 1970s left the line without cross-border traffic and while traffic from the Spanish side to Canfranc has resumed and there are some ideas on the French side of reopening traffic, the station - and all the infrastructure built to support it - seems weirdly out of place and way overbuilt.
Get in
By train
- 🌍
Canfranc International railway station. This station, which could as well double as a "see" listing is without a doubt the main draw of Canfranc and "what put it on the map". While these days there are once again trains from Spain via Huesca, traffic from France which was not interrupted by the Second World War ceased in the 1970s after an accident damaged the railway infrastructure and it was decided not to rebuild it. Various stories of differing degrees of plausibility and truthfulness surround the station, including tales of daring escapes, espionage, smuggling and human tragedies and comedies.
The station shows signs of its age and of large parts of it having been unused for decades, but in summer 2018 works to renovate the station were begin which are planned to last until spring 2019.
