Costa Verde Express — nothing about it is old except the styling

Renfe sells the Costa Verde Express as a return to the golden age of rail travel, and the marketing is not wrong about the effect. The lounge cars have table lamps and heavy curtains, the suites are lined in wood veneer, there is a bar with a dance floor, and the whole thing crawls along the Cantabrian coast at a pace that belongs to another century.

Almost none of it is actually old.

The train was built in 2000, in FEVE's own workshops in Asturias, as a straight copy of El Transcantábrico — a twin ordered because one train could not meet the demand. It ran as Transcantábrico II, then as Transcantábrico Clásico from 2011, and took the name Costa Verde Express in 2022 along with a shorter route and the dark green livery it wears now. The locomotives that haul it are older in origin and newer in substance: 1960s machines stripped to the frames between 2002 and 2004 and rebuilt as hybrids that can draw current from the overhead wire or run on their own diesel engine, a combination that had no precedent in Spain when it appeared.

Which is presumably why, when Renfe wanted to find out whether a train could run on diesel made from used cooking oil, this was the train it picked. In August 2026 a Series 619 was drained at the El Berrón depot in Asturias, refilled with a thousand litres of renewable HVO, and sent out at the head of the Costa Verde Express. It worked. The operator now has a protocol with Repsol to push the fuel onto the six per cent of its network that diesel still runs.

So the most convincingly antique train in Spain turns out to be the one doing the experimental work. The reader gets six days along the green north — Bilbao to Santiago de Compostela or the reverse, sleeping on board in a station every night — on a machine whose only genuinely old thing is the idea of it.

The rails run from Bilbao-Concordia to Ferrol, about six hundred and fifty kilometres of metre gauge strung along the Bay of Biscay. This is the old FEVE network — narrow gauge because the Cantabrian mountains made anything wider ruinously expensive to build — and it is still, taken as a whole, the largest metre-gauge system in western Europe. Renfe absorbed it in 2013. The Costa Verde Express uses it as a corridor and a hotel at once.

The six-day itinerary runs in both directions on alternate Saturdays. Westbound it starts at Bilbao-Concordia at ten in the morning with the Guggenheim and lunch on board, then works along the coast through Santander, Cabezón de la Sal, Llanes, Oviedo, Gijón, Luarca, Ribadeo and Viveiro to Ferrol, where a coach takes over for the last stretch to Santiago de Compostela. Eastbound reverses it. Santiago is on the package but not on the railway: the metre gauge stops at Ferrol, and it has always stopped at Ferrol.

The train does its travelling while you are somewhere else

It is worth being clear about how little of the day is spent moving. The pattern is that the train runs a short leg while breakfast is served, sits in a station while a coach takes everybody inland to the Picos de Europa or the Cabrales cheese caves or the Altamira neo-cave, then makes another short hop in the late afternoon before dinner. Every night is spent stabled in a station — Viveiro, Luarca, Llanes, Cabezón de la Sal, Santander — with the train shut down and quiet.

Renfe is unusually candid about what this means. Its own conditions of contract state that it accepts no commitment on punctuality for these trains, on the grounds that their purpose is not the transport of passengers but the delivery of a programme. A reader looking for a day at the window watching the Cantabrian coast go by will find the Costa Verde Express spends more of the daylight stationary than in motion.

Twenty-four suites and four lounges

Accommodation is the Gran Clase Suite, and there is only one grade of it: about six square metres including the bathroom, wood-veneer panelling, a sofa by day and a 1.35-metre double bed by night, desk, minibar, safe, wardrobe, private bathroom, air conditioning on its own regulator. Spanish Wikipedia puts the count at twenty-four; Renfe's own figure is that the whole train can be chartered for a maximum of fifty-four people, which is the only capacity number the operator publishes.

The four saloon cars are the part the operator is proudest of. One carries a bar and a dance floor, another a second and quieter bar, and the remaining two are for sitting and looking out. The train is gangwayed throughout, so passengers move freely from end to end.

Naming the traction

The locomotives are Renfe Series 619, and they are the reason this page exists at all. Seventeen were produced between 2002 and 2004 by taking FEVE's worn-out Series 1000 machines — Alsthom products — and replacing the body and the engine entirely. The work was done at Alsasua by a CAF–Sunsundegui joint venture with Siemens electrical equipment. What came out is a Bo′Bo′ of sixty tonnes carrying one Caterpillar 3512B diesel and four Siemens traction motors, able to work off the catenary where the coast is wired and off its own engine where it is not, at roughly the same power either way. FEVE numbered them 1901–1917; Renfe renumbered them Series 619 when it took the narrow-gauge network over in 2013.

That dual capability is exactly the problem the HVO trial is aimed at. Where the wire runs out — and on the metre-gauge north it runs out often — the engine is burning diesel, and Renfe's stated position is that 94% of its passenger demand in 2025 was already met by carbon-neutral electric traction while the remaining 6% was not. The Costa Verde Express was the train sent out to prove that the last 6% could run on waste instead.

There is no daily timetable to quote. The Costa Verde Express runs a fixed list of dated departures, each one a package with a set programme, and the dates below were read on 18 August 2026 from Renfe's own itinerary pages at spanishluxurytrain.com (opens in a new tab) and cross-checked against the live booking system at venta.renfe.com, which sells them.

The six-day run, 2026

Departures alternate direction on consecutive Saturdays. Reception is at 10:00 on the first day, and the trip finishes at about 16:30 on the sixth.

The two dates in bold are the ones Renfe's booking system still showed as available. The other four came back marked Tren Completo — the train is full. There is also one short trip left in 2026: Santiago de Compostela to Oviedo, 31 October to 2 November, three days and two nights, finishing about 14:00.

The 2027 season

The 2027 dates went on sale during the summer of 2026 and are already bookable.

The July and August gap, and what fills it

The long itinerary does not run in high summer. Across both seasons there is a single July departure and no August one at all, and the same pattern holds for 2027: May, June, September, October, and nothing in between.

For 2027 Renfe has put something else in that gap. The Weekend itinerary is new, it runs on Friday evenings through July and August, and it goes almost nowhere: boarding at Oviedo from 18:30, dinner served as the train slips out to El Berrón at 21:30, a day at Llanes, a dinner with live performance, and back into Oviedo the following afternoon. The operator's own description carries the words "no excursions". It is the same train and the same suites with the coach programme taken out, and it stables the first night at El Berrón — the depot where the renewable-fuel trial was run a fortnight before these dates went on sale.

Renfe's reservation centre is on +34 91 255 59 12 and trenesturisticosdelujo@renfe.es, and the same departures are sold through travel agents and through the booking form on the operator's site.

Renfe publishes the fare per person, sharing a Gran Clase double suite, while its booking engine quotes the same trips per suite. The two are consistent once that is understood, and the confusion is why third-party sites carry wildly varying numbers for this train — "about €9,000" is the price of a suite for one person, not a price per head. For 2027 the six-day trip is €5,300 per person sharing, with a €4,250 single supplement. Prices read from Renfe's 2027 tariff page on 18 August 2026.

Everything is in the fare: all meals, the guided excursions and the coach, entry to the museums on the programme, and compulsory travel insurance. So is getting there — Renfe issues a promotional code for free travel to the start and home from the end on any of its long-distance services. A booking is confirmed against a 15% deposit, with the balance due thirty days out.

No rail pass applies to this train, and no rail pass is worth buying because of it.

An Interrail or Eurail pass covers scheduled Renfe services, and Interrail draws the line itself: beside the Renfe services it lists as included, its table of railway companies for Spain keeps a column of exclusions, and the first two entries in it are "RENFE Luxury trains" and "RENFE Tourist trains". This train is one of those. It is sold as an all-inclusive package with accommodation, meals, coaches and museum entry folded into a single price, and the fare is not a rail fare a pass can be set against. There is no pass-holder discount and no reduced rate for arriving with a pass in a pocket.

The useful thing in this area comes from the operator instead. Renfe includes free travel to and from the start and end of the trip anywhere in its Spanish network — AVE, Alvia, Avlo, Long Distance and Media Distancia — issued as promotional codes, one per person per journey. The conditions are that the connecting journeys run on consecutive days and that no more than 48 hours separates them from the trip itself. For a passenger joining at Bilbao or Santiago from Madrid, Barcelona, Seville or Valencia, that is worth considerably more than any pass would be, and it is already in the price.

The scheduled metre-gauge service over the same coast is a different matter. Renfe's ordinary narrow-gauge trains run Ferrol to Oviedo and Oviedo to Santander every day, they cost a few euros, and they are covered by Interrail and Eurail in the normal way. A traveller who wants the Cantabrian coast from a train window rather than the Cantabrian coast as a hotel programme can have most of the same scenery that way, without a suite and without the excursions.

Pass conditions checked against Interrail's published list of railway companies on 20 August 2026.

The excursions are fixed and included, so the list below is not a menu — it is what the programme actually does with the days while the train waits in a station.

Between them the two directions take in the Guggenheim at Bilbao, the medieval streets of Santillana del Mar and the Altamira neo-cave, the Picos de Europa by way of Arenas de Cabrales and its cheese caves, the old town of Oviedo and the seafront at Gijón, the water-powered workshops above Taramundi, the harbours at Luarca and Viveiro, and a farewell lunch at the Parador in Santiago de Compostela. The eastbound run adds a boat across the bay to Santoña and an anchovy cannery; the 2027 short trip from Santiago picks up the Playa de las Catedrales on the Lugo coast.

The cards below cover six of them.

Every night of the trip is spent on the train, in the suite that comes with the fare, in a station with the train shut down for the night. There is no hotel to book and no choice to make about it.

What a traveller does need is somewhere for the night before and the night after, because the programme begins at ten in the morning at one end of Spain and finishes in the late afternoon at the other. The three houses below are at the points where the package hands you over: the Parador that is itself the meeting point in Santiago, the station-side grand hotel in Bilbao, and the one in Oviedo where the short itineraries and the 2027 weekend trips begin and end.

None of them is affiliated with Renfe and none is included in the fare.