Ferrol to Santander — the railway nobody had measured

Spain's metre-gauge north is one railway in the way that a hedgerow is one plant. It was assembled over most of a century out of separate companies and separate state contracts, and it runs from Ferrol, on the Atlantic corner of Galicia, along the whole Cantabrian coast to Bilbao. Two ordinary Renfe trains a day cover the western half of it, and two more cover the next section, and between them they will carry anyone from Ferrol to Santander for about forty euros over two days.

What nobody had, until very recently, was a record of how big it is.

When the Spanish state finally ordered new trains for this network — the first Renfe had ever bought for it, tendered in February 2019 — the specification pointed at the national gauge instruction of 2015. That document sets the clearance envelope for metre-gauge lines being built or renewed. It says nothing about the tunnels already there, some of which were cut in the 1920s and are smaller; for those, it tells the infrastructure manager to declare the real profile instead. For this network the real profile had never been declared. Adif's own laser survey had found, in 2018, more than six hundred points between Oviedo, Santander and Bilbao that did not meet the standard, and it took a separate contract, awarded in 2021, to send a scanner through all 248 tunnels — 33 in Galicia, 160 in Asturias, 18 in Cantabria, 20 in Vizcaya and 17 in Castilla y León — and find out what the railway measured.

Design stopped in January 2021. The newspapers got it two years later, under the headline that Spain had bought trains too big for its tunnels, and on 20 February 2023 the president of Renfe and the Secretary of State for Transport both resigned. The real answer was less lurid and more telling: the old operator had always sized its new stock by measuring it against the trains already running, and nobody had ever written that rule into Spanish law. It was written on 15 February 2023, days after the story broke.

So the trains still running here are the ones that were meant to have been replaced. The fleet averaged twenty-eight years old in 2020, and the units on the Ferrol road are Spanish-built railcars of 2009 and 1980s electrics on the wired sections. The journey they make is five hundred and thirty kilometres of single track laid along the edge of the Bay of Biscay, at a little over forty kilometres an hour, through Galician estuaries and Asturian pasture and under the limestone wall of the Picos de Europa, stopping ninety times between Ferrol and Oviedo alone.

The line begins at Ferrol, where the metre gauge and the Iberian gauge share one station and very little else. The 08:20 is a two-car diesel railcar, and within three minutes of leaving it is at San Xoán, the first of eighty-eight intermediate stops. Some of them are villages. Many are a concrete platform, a nameboard and a lamp, and the train calls at all of them, which is why a journey of 314 kilometres takes seven hours and twenty-two minutes.

For the first hour the railway keeps inland, climbing away from the ría through San Sadurniño and Moeche and over the moorland behind Cerdido, where the map shows almost nothing. It meets the sea properly at Ortigueira, an hour and eighteen minutes out, and from there it works east along the Galician Mariña — O Barqueiro, O Vicedo, the estuary at Viveiro, where it crosses the Landro on a stone viaduct in the middle of the town. Burela and Foz are fishing ports. Then Ribadeo, at kilometre 146, where the train waits four minutes and the Eo estuary opens on the left; the far bank is Asturias.

Where the state ran out of money for fifty years

The Galician section is the youngest part of the whole coast, and it took the longest. A railway from Ferrol to Gijón was first approved by the Congress of Deputies in 1886, to connect the artillery barracks at Ferrol with the arms and explosives works of Asturias. It went into the secondary railways plan of 1888 and the Strategic and Secondary Railways Act of 1906, which fixed it at metre gauge. Construction did not start until 1921, and then the state built it in fragments: Avilés to Pravia in 1953, Pravia to Luarca in 1962, Viveiro to Vegadeo in 1968. The last stretch, Luarca to Vegadeo, opened on 6 September 1972, eighty-six years after the first approval. It had needed 110 tunnels and 27 viaducts over 320 kilometres, and cost 4,250 million pesetas.

The best of that engineering comes an hour past Ribadeo. The viaduct at Luarca carries the railway over the Negro valley on a single concrete arch, high above the roofs, and the train crosses it slowly enough to look down. Beyond Luarca the line turns inland through Cadavedo and Novellana and drops to Cudillero at 14:08, where the wires begin: from here to Gijón the route is electrified as part of the Asturian suburban network, and the diesel railcar runs under a catenary it does not use.

The turn away from the sea

At Pravia the train leaves the coast and turns inland on a railway built for a different purpose altogether. This is the old Ferrocarril de El Vasco, promoted from Oviedo in 1899 by Basque and Asturian industrialists to carry Asturian coal down the Caudal and the Nalón to the port of San Esteban de Pravia and out by sea to the steelworks of Vizcaya; the Oviedo–San Esteban section was open by 1904, and the company was folded into the national narrow-gauge operator in 1972 — the same year the coast line was finally completed. The train works up it through Grado to Trubia, where it stands five minutes and changes direction, because trains between Pravia and Oviedo reverse here. Oviedo comes at 15:42, and Oviedo is where the journey stops for the night: the day's last through train to Santander left at 14:44. The onward departures are 07:57 and 14:44, and the first of them takes five hours and thirty-nine minutes to cover the remaining 217 kilometres, calling forty-six times.

That second day is the better half. The railway runs out through El Berrón and Pola de Siero into the Piloña valley, and by Infiesto the Picos de Europa are on the right — a limestone wall that stays in the window for the next hour. Arriondas is the town for the Sella descent, Ribadesella the estuary where that river reaches the sea, and then the line runs along the Llanes coast through Nueva, Posada, Celorio and Poo, with the Sierra del Cuera inland and a string of horseshoe bays below. Llanes itself gets a seven-minute stand.

The bridge at Unquera crosses the Deva and the regional boundary in one span: Asturias behind, Cantabria in front. San Vicente de la Barquera, Cabezón de la Sal, then a long slow run through Torrelavega, and Santander arrives at 13:36, on the terminus platforms beside the Iberian-gauge station.

What is actually pulling you

The regionals are series 2700 railcars — Renfe's class 527 — twenty-three two-car diesel sets built by CAF on an order placed in December 2007 and delivered through 2009 and 2010, the first entering service at El Berrón on 18 August 2009. They are 35 metres long, 2.55 metres wide, seat ninety, and were the last stock the old operator bought. Their dimensions were arrived at by the comparative method — measured against the trains already running — which is precisely the practice that the 2015 regulation forgot, and precisely the practice the state had to legalise in 2023 to get their replacements built.

Two trains a day run the length of each half, every day of the week. All times below were read from Renfe's own timetable service on 19 August 2026, and checked against travel dates in August, September and October 2026, which returned the same pattern each time.

Ferrol to Oviedo — 313.8 km, about 7 h 25

Westbound, train 71830 leaves Oviedo at 07:19 and reaches Ferrol at 14:44; train 71832 leaves at 14:18 and arrives at 21:44.

Two further trains, 71801 at 10:45 and 71803 at 19:05, run from Ferrol as far as Ribadeo only.

Oviedo to Santander — 216.9 km, about 5 h 40

Westbound, train 71850 leaves Santander at 08:29 and reaches Oviedo at 13:56; train 71852 leaves at 15:28 and arrives at 21:01.

Two more departures from Oviedo, 71821 at 11:10 and 71823 at 18:39, run only as far as Llanes.

The connection that does not exist

Ferrol to Santander in one day is not on the timetable. The morning train from Ferrol reaches Oviedo at 15:42, an hour after the last through service to Santander has gone; the evening train arrives at 23:05. A night in Oviedo is part of the journey rather than a mishap, and the 07:57 the next morning is the better of the two eastbound departures, because it puts the Picos de Europa and the Llanes coast in daylight.

Renfe publishes departures, calling points and fares for every one of these trains through the journey planner at renfe.com (opens in a new tab). Engineering work on this network is announced through Renfe's own newsroom rather than in the timetable, and replacement buses have run on sections of the Asturian coast for weeks at a time.

These are ordinary Renfe regional trains on ordinary regional fares. Ferrol to Oviedo is €24.10 in Turista, the only class these trains have, and Oviedo to Santander €16.35 — so the whole 530.7 kilometres costs €40.45 in two tickets. Shorter legs are priced in proportion. Children of 4 to 13 pay 40% less. Seats are not reserved and the trains are two cars long, so a bank-holiday Friday out of Oviedo can be standing room. Fares read from Renfe on 19 August 2026.

Cercanías travel in Asturias and Cantabria is free through 2026, but it is a season ticket rather than a free ride: registration with a Spanish identity number, a €10 deposit per four-month period, and one pass per area. It is compensation for replacement trains three years late, and it is for the people who use these lines every day — a visitor riding the regionals pays the fares above.

These are Renfe trains, and Renfe is an Interrail and Eurail participating operator. Interrail's own guide to Spanish trains, read on 19 August 2026, lists the regional services of the former FEVE network in northern Spain among the trains a pass covers, alongside Cercanías and the rest of Renfe's regional fleet. There is no compulsory reservation on any of them and no seat allocation at all, so a pass holder boards and sits down.

What a pass will not do is save money on this particular journey. Ferrol to Santander in two ordinary tickets comes to €40.45, and the individual legs are €24.10 and €16.35 — fares low enough that a travel day spent on them is worth less than a travel day spent on almost anything else in Spain. The sensible use of a pass here is incidental: someone already holding one for a longer Spanish trip rides the metre gauge at no extra cost, and someone travelling only this route is better served by the ticket office.

One caveat that catches people on the north coast: the Basque operator Euskotren, which runs the metre gauge onward from Bilbao into Gipuzkoa, is not an Interrail participating company. That matters only beyond Santander, where the metre gauge continues to Bilbao under Renfe and then passes into other hands.

Pass conditions change by season and by year, and the ones described here were checked in August 2026 against Interrail's published guidance.

Almost everything worth stopping for on this line is within a few minutes' walk of a platform, which is the compensation for a train that stops ninety times. The Galician Mariña gives a beach cut into sea caves; Asturias gives two fishing towns built vertically into their own cliffs; and the eastern end runs through the Llanes coast and into Cantabria past a castle on an estuary. The five below are in order along the route, west to east.

The timetable makes one overnight stop compulsory and one optional. Oviedo is the compulsory one, because no train connects Ferrol to Santander in a day. Ferrol repays an early night before the 08:20, and Santander is the end of the line. All three houses below are on their own historic buildings and within reach of the station on foot or by a short taxi ride.