Galicia, poorly connected

By Álvaro J. Díaz-Mella

There is no shortage of airports, ports, roads, or railways. What is lacking is a network designed as a system.

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Vigo se muere. La ciudad de las luces que se apaga

Last Saturday, Aurelio, an old friend from my university days in Madrid, celebrated his 60th birthday in Pedreña, across from Santander. The invitation held something special for me: it meant reuniting with friends from that time whom I hadn't seen in person for many years, some for around thirty. My wife couldn't come because of work, but I knew I wanted to be there.

And it was worth it. Thirty years is a long time. Some have less hair, others have more gray, some have gained a few pounds and others have lost them, and there were even friends I didn't recognize for a few seconds until they smiled. Then they were themselves again. Many came with children who are now around twenty years old, a pretty effective way of reminding us how much time had passed. We reminisced about anecdotes we thought were forgotten and also remembered those who were no longer with us, some who died too young, leaving behind wives and young children. It was one of those reunions where joy and nostalgia end up sitting at the same table.

But before I could sit down at that table, I had to resolve something much more practical: how to get from Vigo to Santander. By car, it was 574 kilometers and a little over five hours each way. The direct bus took around ten hours, sometimes more. The train wasn't much of a solution either: there's no direct connection, and the available combinations involved around ten hours and at least one transfer. In the end, I got lucky. I found a direct flight for 200 euros round trip. It wasn't exactly a bargain, but compared to more than 1,100 kilometers by car round trip, ten hours on a bus each way, or a complicated train connection, the decision was quite simple.

While I was looking for those alternatives, I realized something we sometimes forget when we discuss infrastructure. I didn't have any particular interest in traveling by plane, train, bus, or car. I simply wanted to get to Santander in a reasonable way.

We citizens don't need a specific mode of transport. We need to be well-connected.

A week later, I opened the newspaper and found several articles that seemed to continue that experience. One explained that the Ministry of Transport's new road concession map plans to reduce bus frequencies between Vigo and Madrid starting in 2028, relying on rail development to absorb a good portion of those journeys. On the same page, I discovered that two of the three longest bus routes in Spain stop in Vigo. Opposite, another article reported that Algeria, Morocco, and the United States are among the main destinations for exports leaving the Port of Vigo. Perhaps those pages were unwittingly telling the same story: Vigo is far from almost everything by land and close to half the world by sea. But it would be too easy to blame it all on geography. Our problem isn't simply that Galicia is far away. It's that too often it's poorly connected to what's close by.

Just look inland. Vigo and Lugo are separated by a mere 189 kilometers by road, and yet there isn't even a direct train between the two cities. To travel by rail between Galicia's largest city and one of its four provincial capitals, you have to change trains, usually in Ourense, and spend around four hours on the journey. Despite the significant investments underway to modernize the connection between Lugo and Ourense via Monforte, a direct service between Vigo and Lugo doesn't seem to be among the announced projects. We can talk a lot about high-speed rail and major corridors, but a Galician rail network should start with something quite basic: ensuring that our main cities are reasonably connected to each other.

If we look south, we find another paradox. Less than 160 kilometers from Vigo lies Porto, one of the largest metropolitan areas on the Iberian Peninsula, and an airport that handles far more passengers than all three Galician airports combined. However, our rail connection with Portugal remains far from what one would expect between two territories with such strong economic, industrial, and human ties. It is also striking that there is a wide range of direct buses from Vigo to Sá Carneiro Airport, while the direct service to Lavacolla, our main Galician airport, is significantly less frequent, often requiring a trip to Santiago and a connecting bus. The market seems to have understood before our administrations that proximity and connectivity are not the same thing.

The administrative border of Tuy shouldn't determine how we understand the map. The Galician Atlantic axis and northern Portugal form an economic space that needs better north-south connections. Bringing Vigo closer to Porto can be, in certain sectors, as important as bringing it closer to Madrid. And by sea, almost the opposite is true: goods leave the Port of Vigo for Morocco, Algeria, and the United States. What separates us by land from the heart of Europe simultaneously places us at the crossroads of some of the major international shipping routes. Our geography is neither good nor bad. It depends on what we do with it.

For decades, we have tried to compensate for our situation by investing in transportation. Galicia has three airports, five ports of general interest, highways and expressways, an extensive road network, and a high-speed rail connection that reaches Ourense. We certainly didn't start from scratch. But perhaps we have lacked something more important: thinking about how Galicia should move in the 21st century. Bus concessions are sometimes under the jurisdiction of the central government and other times of the regional government; roads are divided among different administrations; the railway has its own management and airports theirs. Each can perfectly explain the extent of its responsibility.

The problem arises when no one seems to be responsible for the entire journey.

The new road concession map offers a good example. If, in a few years, a sufficiently fast, frequent, and competitive rail connection exists between Vigo and Madrid, it's logical that many travelers will prefer the train and that demand for buses will decrease. But the order should be different: the alternative must function correctly first, and then services should be adapted to the new reality, not the other way around. If the Ministry reduces a service, the Galician Regional Government (Xunta) considers that decision detrimental to Galicia, and both administrations are unable to agree on an alternative, it is the citizen who loses the connection. Those who need to travel are not traveling between administrative jurisdictions: they are traveling between places. The State and the Xunta should coordinate their networks and seek joint solutions. What fault does the citizen have if the administrations are unable to manage the whole in a coordinated manner?

The most frustrating thing is that poor planning can affect us for generations. A rail connection that was never built, a poorly planned road, or modes of transport that were not conceived jointly can burden the region for decades. Governments change, politicians come and go, but the bill remains. We, the citizens, continue to pay it with our taxes, our time, and our lost opportunities. It's not about demanding that a leader be held personally accountable for every decision that later proves wrong, but about demanding political accountability for the results. Because spending a lot doesn't necessarily mean investing wisely.

The alternative is not simply to build more. Ports need good rail and road connections to move goods; airports need fast access routes that expand their catchment area; the railway must connect our cities with each other and efficiently link us with Portugal and the rest of Spain; buses must complement this network where rail is not competitive, and roads will remain essential in a territory as dispersed as ours. It's about making better use of what we have and deciding on new investments with a view to how they fit together. A transport policy shouldn't begin by asking how many kilometers of high-speed rail, how many flights, or how many highways we can inaugurate, but rather where people and goods need to move and what is the most efficient way to achieve this.

I managed to get to Aurelio's birthday party and returned to Vigo with the feeling that the trip had been well worth it. Reconnecting so many years later, meeting the grown children of some friends, and remembering together those who had passed away reminded me that behind any discussion about transportation lies something quite simple: people who need to get somewhere.

Galicia can't move a few hundred kilometers to the heart of Europe, but it doesn't need to. We have ports, airports, roads, and railways; we have industry, an extraordinary Atlantic coastline, and Portugal right next door. Many of the pieces are already in place. Perhaps it's time to stop arguing about who gets what and start thinking about how to fit them together.

Álvaro J. Díaz-Mella
Vigo, August 2026

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Photo: Elentir / Translation: Elentir.