Cycling

Spain’s ‘Vìas Verdes’

by AsturArcadia

You enjoy walking, you love the countryside, but perhaps the idea of slogging up vertiginous mountainsides in sweltering heat or Arctic blizzards does not appeal. Take a look, then, at the www.viasverdes.com website (yes, there is an English version).

A ‘Vía Verde’ is a ‘greenway’ – a misnomer perhaps, since the majority are surfaced in asphalt, concrete or compacted hardcore. Technically, the term is used in Spain to refer only to cycle- and footpaths created on abandoned railway trackbeds. Of which there are a surprising number scattered throughout the country.

Compared with some other European countries, Spain was rather late in recognising the value of her not inconsiderable industrial heritage, and in realising the need to preserve certain aspects of it for posterity. One of the first moves came in 1985 with the creation of the Madrid-based Fundación de Ferrocarriles Españoles, a State-funded body which acts at curator and promoter for museums, archives, libraries, cultural activities, courses and studies related to railways and rail transport. In 1993 the Fundación compiled an inventory of abandoned railway infrastructure. The findings were astounding – around 7,600 km of route, together with station buildings, tunnels, viaducts and other civil engineering structures, lay crumbling into ruin. What was amazing was that so much had survived until then, and that a good deal of it was still in a state that could be restored, for other uses.

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