The International Station of Canfranc: 100 years of history in the middle of the Pyrenees

The answer comes down to two words: track gauge. Spain built its railway network on a wider gauge than the European one, so no French train could carry on into Spain, or the other way round. At the border, every passenger had to get off and every piece of freight had to be transferred from one train to another, with two customs services, two police forces and two administrations doing the paperwork at once.

You do not solve that with a halt: you solve it with a city under one roof. The building is 241 metres long and 12.5 wide, with 75 doors on each side and 365 windows — one for each day of the year, as local tradition has it. From the outside it looks like a nineteenth-century French palace; inside it was a logistics machine of concrete, stone, iron and glass, under slate roofs.

The station was inaugurated on 18 July 1928 by King Alfonso XIII and the French president Gaston Doumergue. It was the culmination of decades of work: the Somport tunnel, the viaducts, the platform carved out of the valley — all to connect Zaragoza with Pau and, in theory, put the Aragonese Pyrenees on the map of European trade.

The traffic never lived up to the building. The Spanish Civil War closed the line, and by the time it reopened the world had changed: Europe was going to war, and Canfranc stopped being a commercial promise and became something far murkier.

Between 1940 and 1944, with France occupied and Spain officially neutral, Canfranc was one of the few gaps left open between Nazi Europe and the outside world. Across its platforms went the wolfram that Franco's regime was selling to the Third Reich — a mineral essential for armour and ammunition — and, in the other direction, gold looted by the Nazis that paid for it.

Across those same platforms, and often on the same trains, went Jews, Allies, downed pilots and refugees fleeing the occupation. Spies from both sides lived in the village. Hence the nickname that stuck: the Casablanca of the Pyrenees.

Much of this history came to light late. In 2000, boxes of French customs paperwork — delivery notes, freight records — turned up in the station itself, making it possible to reconstruct the real scale of that traffic.

Albert Le Lay was the head of the French customs post in Canfranc. His office was inside the station, on the French side of the building, and his signature decided who crossed and who did not. Le Lay used that power for the opposite of what was expected of him: he provided papers, looked the other way and organised crossings for hundreds of people fleeing Nazism. In the end he had to flee himself.

His story is now the heart of the theatrical tour of the Canfranc Station: an hour and a half in which an actor steps into Le Lay's shoes and walks you through the very spaces where it all happened. It is the most direct way to understand what was at stake here.

The end came by accident. In 1970 a freight train derailed on the French side and took the L’Estanguet bridge down with it. France, which had long considered the line loss-making, decided not to rebuild it. Without the bridge there was no international connection, and without an international connection the station had no purpose.

What followed was thirty-odd years of abandonment: leaks, broken glass, pigeons and a façade falling apart while the building became a pilgrimage site for photographers and urban explorers. In 2002 it was declared a Site of Cultural Interest, the step that made everything afterwards possible.

The restoration, driven by the Government of Aragón, brought back the 1928 structure and façade and adapted the interior to a new use. On 27 January 2023 the building reopened as the Canfranc Estación, a Royal Hideaway Hotel, the luxury brand of the Barceló Hotel Group: 104 rooms — 4 of them suites — on the first and second floors, with the ground floor given over to the wellness area with a heated pool, the library and the main restaurant, for which period carriages were restored.

The result is unusual and very good: a hotel where the room corridor is literally the building of an international railway station, and where the concourse is still the concourse the trains of 1928 passed through. That the building now has an economic use is also what guarantees it stays standing.

There are three ways to see it, and they complement each other well:

• Special guided tour: 1 h 30 min with a local guide, 8 stops through the interior and the railway grounds, and access to restricted areas that the standard tour does not reach. From €15 per person. The default choice if you are only doing one.
• Theatrical tour with Albert Le Lay: 1 h 30 min with an actor playing the French customs officer. From €18. Run in Spanish only.
• Paseo de los Melancólicos and the bunkers: about 2 h on foot along paths and through woodland, with the best exterior views of the complex and an explanation of why the valley filled up with fortifications. Private tour from €40.

Canfranc-Estación is in the Aragón valley, about 25 km from Jaca and next to the Somport tunnel. If you are coming for the day, the usual plan is to combine a visit to the station in the morning with a mountain activity in the afternoon: hiking in summer; snowshoeing or skiing in Astún and Candanchú in winter.