Finally! Today we want to share with you a fantastic news. The high-speed train (AVE) has arrived in Granada on Tuesday almost 20 years after the first news.
AVE routes connect Granada with Madrid and Barcelona and include the new 122-kilometer long line between Antequera (Malaga) and the Andalusian capital.
The AVE connection to Granada is the first launched in Spain in almost a year and a half. “This infrastructure will be a real historic accelerator for the city and the province,” said the president, Pedro Sanchez, at the inauguration, and Sanchez stressed the importance of the work and its value for the tourism, since it shortens the journey a lot. Gerardo Cuerva, president of the businessmen of Granada and aboard this first AVE, commented during the trip that “the important thing is to look forward […] we have had a closed door for a long time and now that we have opened it, we are sure that it’s going to be very positive, especially in the tourist sector, maybe not so much for the users of the companies”.
AVE will allow traveling by train between Madrid and Granada in a travel time of between three hours and three hours and twenty minutes. It involves reducing the current Madrid-Granada connection format by cutting about 50 minutes, in a travel where you had to take both the train and the bus. The beginning of the journeys in AVE to and from Granada does not imply, in any case, the end of the works in the infrastructure. This is the first day of the rest of the Granada AVE’s life, which will stay although there are still many pending subjects to improve its performance and times. For the moment, in 22 days of ticket sales, they have sold 40,000 tickets.
According to Renfe, the high speed travel between Granada and Madrid and Barcelona will mean “a substantial benefit in terms of travel times and will result in economic and social growth for Granada”.