SecondEarlier this month, a 12-meter-long model train carriage Stored at Barcelona’s El Prat Airport, Spain’s airport authorities are controversially planning to expand. “More trains, fewer planes” is a side message from Greenpeace activists who plan to take their models to a European tour in the coming months.
When they do, they may make a celebratory stop at the French-Spanish border.In a village high in the Pyrenees, Europe’s most amazing railway station is about to be built recover With its former glory, the lines it served majesticly reopened. Canfranc International Station was completed in 1928 and was conceived as a railway “cathedral” with a degree of grandeur that the world’s greatest city can provide. Overlooking the mountains, this huge mansion is 240 meters long and has 365 windows and 156 doors, which dwarfs St. Pancras in London; but numbers alone cannot convey the grandeur that its architecture and charming environment evoke. Canfranc aims to merge the French and Spanish border stations into one building. It is a moving monument that embodies the spirit of internationalism and the pride of architectural achievements that marked the golden age of railways.
Unfortunately, since the cross-border line was closed in 1970, Canfranc has witnessed key events in the history of the 20th century. During the Spanish Civil War, General Francisco Franco blocked the tunnel to prevent the delivery of weapons to the Republican army. The movement of goods and people during World War II made this village known as “Casablanca in the Pyrenees”; spies, agents and desperate Jewish refugees fleeing Vichy France passed by, According to some accounts, including artists Max Ernst and Marc ChagallBut for fifty years, as cheap flights have transformed travel across the rest of the African continent, Canfranc’s faded beauty has mainly become the melancholy object of industrial history historians.
The plan was planned by the French Aragon regional government and the European Commission to make Canfranc a five-star hotel and build a new small station. All goes well, the cross-border route will reopen in 2026, but work so far has been delayed due to the pandemic. If environmental issues are driving the development of the project, that would be an exaggeration, although the route restored by France will reduce the demand for freight trucks. Renaissance Canfranc is more about regional memory and identity.
But nearly 100 years after the station was first opened, the imagination and ambition in its construction remind people of how fascinating and enticing rail travel is.From Belle Epoque Restaurant That Add luster to Paris Lyon Train Station, arrive The early 20th-century modernism of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, Europe’s first-class railway station offers aesthetic experiences and history courses, as well as greener travel options. If the goal of carbon neutrality is to be achieved by 2050, more of us will need more time to pass them. Canfranc may be revitalized as a hotel, but its revival can still inspire us to “take more trains and less planes.”
