At least 39 people died in southern Spain after a high-speed train derailed and collided with an oncoming one on Sunday night in the worst railway accident in the country since 2013.
The accident happened at 7:45pm (1845 GMT) near Adamuz in the province of Cordoba, about 360km (223 miles) south of the capital Madrid. It left 122 people injured, with 48 still in hospital and 12 in intensive care, according to emergency services.
“The train tipped to one side… then everything went dark, and all I heard was screams,” said Ana, a young woman who was travelling back to Madrid and was being treated at a Red Cross centre in Adamuz.
Limping and wrapped in a blanket, her face covered with plasters, she described how she was dragged out of the train covered in blood through a window by other passengers who had escaped. Firefighters rescued her sister from the wreckage and an ambulance took them both to hospital.
“There were people who were fine and others who were very, very badly injured. You had them right in front of you and you knew they were going to die, and you couldn’t do anything,” she said.
COMPLICATED RESCUE OPERATION
The rescue operation was complicated by the remote location of the crash, which could only be accessed by a single-track road, making it difficult for ambulances to enter and exit, Iñigo Vila, national emergency director at the Spanish Red Cross, told Reuters.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and Transport Minister Oscar Puente were among those making their way to the crash site on Monday morning.
“The death toll has risen to 39 and is not yet definitive,” Puente said on X.
There were around 400 passengers on the two trains, operated by Iryo and Alvia, according to a statement from state-owned rail operator Renfe.
The Iryo train was en route from Malaga to Madrid, while the second train was heading towards Huelva.
It was too early to talk about the cause, but it happened in “strange conditions”, Renfe President Álvaro Fernandez Heredia said on local radio station Cadena Ser, adding that “human error is practically ruled out.”
The Alvia train coming in the opposite direction at 200 km per hour either collided with the final two carriages of the Iryo train that derailed or with debris on the line, Heredia said. The Iryo train was travelling at 110 km per hour, he said, adding that it had lost a wheel that has not yet been located.
The collision happened about 20 seconds after the derailment, so there was no time to activate an emergency brake, he said.
The death toll is the highest from a train crash since 2013, when a train derailed in the northwestern city of Santiago de Compostela and burst into flames, killing 80 people and injuring 145.
Over 200 trains between Madrid and the southern Andalusia region – including major cities Cordoba, Seville and Granada – were cancelled on Monday, according to RTVE.
TRACK WAS RENOVATED LAST YEAR
Puente said in Madrid on Monday that the Iryo train was less than four years old and that the railway track had been completely renovated last May with an investment of 700 million euros ($813.5 million). Iryo said the train was last inspected on Jan 15.
Spain’s high-speed railway network has 3,622km of tracks, according to state-owned rail infrastructure administrator Adif, making it the largest in Europe and the second-biggest in the world after China.
Around 10 million people used the high-speed railway connection between Madrid and Andalusia in 2024, according to competition authority CNMC.
The government was criticised last year for a series of delays on the network, caused by power outages and the theft of copper cables from the lines. The network is vulnerable to cable thefts as it crosses large swathes of empty countryside.
Spain opened up its high-speed rail network to private competition in 2020 in a bid to offer low-cost alternatives to Renfe’s Ave trains.
Iryo is a joint venture between Italian state railway operator Ferrovie dello Stato, airline Air Nostrum and Spanish infrastructure investment fund Globalvia. It began operating in November 2022, starting with the Madrid-Barcelona route and expanding to other major cities. Alvia is operated by Renfe.