The direct high-speed connection between Malaga and Madrid will return next Thursday, April 30, at 12:00. AVE trains will resume circulation between both cities, as reported by Cadena SER and confirmed to EL PAÍS by sources from the Railway Infrastructure Administrator (Adif), three and a half months after the problems began. First with the section affected by the Adamuz accident, which left 46 fatalities. And then with the landslide over the track near the Malaga town of Álora caused by the storm system that hit Andalusia in early February. Renfe, Iryo, and Ouigo already offer tickets on their websites.
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The infrastructure administrator has explained that services will resume “if there are no unforeseen external factors” after an intervention that required complex work due to the landslide of more than 200,000 cubic meters of earth and the proximity of a high-voltage electricity line. “Once the removal of earth and the wall is completed, railway facilities are currently being restored: electrification, tracks and turnouts, as well as signaling and traffic regulation equipment,” Adif sources report.
Beyond the tragic train collision in Adamuz, which affected a long section of track for weeks, problems with the connection between Madrid and Malaga began on February 4. The rains that fell that day and the previous ones caused a landslide that forced Adif to close the track. The first date offered for the reopening of services was March 8, but shortly after it was moved to the 23rd of the same month because the instability of the terrain due to heavy rainfall prevented technicians from entering with heavy machinery and carrying out an analysis of what had happened. When they did, a new, longer delay occurred, which was announced by the president of the railway administrator himself, Pedro Marco de la Peña, who assured that it was “impossible” to use the tracks on the scheduled date. “We have to change the action plan, we cannot reopen on the 23rd, we are going to undertake a much more extensive operation,” he said, setting the horizon for the end of April. During all that time, Iryo and Ouigo suspended their services, and only Renfe maintained theirs with departure or arrival in Antequera, where it connected travelers by bus to or from Malaga.
The delay caused great controversy. Especially because it occurred on the eve of Easter Week, a holiday period that usually marks the start of the tourist season for the Costa del Sol. The sector announced that the prolonged closure would mean millionaire losses, and later, hotel entrepreneurs calculated 300 million euros in direct losses and 1,300 million euros indirectly. The Andalusian president, Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla, repeated the figure —which was never explained in detail— and the Minister of Tourism, Arturo Bernal, declared Easter Week “definitively” lost. The train service to Antequera, the reinforcements between Malaga and Madrid at the airport, and the good weather ended up overcoming the negative forecasts with the help of international tourism, which filled the hotels.
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The Minister of Transport, Óscar Puente, strongly contested the criticism, assuring the complexity of the repair work on the section in Álora. “The possibilities are what they are: they are limited by physics,” he indicated in a video where he explained that in the work area there was no more space than for the 23 machines and 75 people who worked 24 hours a day, in shifts. “We have been forced to completely dismantle that slope, remove all the earth it contains, and also dismantle the wall to provide a definitive and safe solution to the line,” he said then. “It is difficult to understand the magnitude of the work that had to be undertaken in Álora to recover the Seville-Malaga high-speed line,” he repeated this Tuesday on his X (formerly Twitter) account, which he accompanied with a video of the evolution of the tasks on the ground.
The railway infrastructure administrator now confirms that services will resume next Thursday, albeit with only one track in operation. The president of Adif had already reported that this would be the case due to the need to demolish a wall, work that will extend until summer; and then install a new one, which is expected to last until the end of the year. This will delay the journey “a few minutes,” as explained by the head of the railway administrator, but it will allow direct circulation between Malaga and Madrid to return.
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