Escape Route

Located on the border between France and Spain, sits the now newly renovated Canfranc International Railway Station. Originally construction began on July 12, 1912, on the Somport railway tunnel from the French side. It wasn’t completed until 1915, due to the work having been delayed by the outbreak of First World War. The war halted the best laid plans for a time, and Construction of the station itself did not begin until 1923. It was headed by Fernando Ramírez de Dampierre, a Spanish project engineer. It was formally opened on July 18, 1928, in a ceremony in front of King Alfonso XIII of Spain and the president of the French Republic Gaston Doumergue. It was a beautiful joint effort and was destined to become much more that it was originally planned to be, although not what the Nazis would want it to be. The village of Canfranc is located in the Spanish Pyrenees. That is a location that would become pivotal during World War II, as passenger services continued during the conflict, which provided an escape route into Spain for both Jews and Allied soldiers alike. Of course, the escape wasn’t easy. Aware of these movements, Nazi agents frequently sought to intervene against passengers of interest. The resistance had to make sure that these escapees had the best quality fake passports and papers to ensure their safety. Names were changed, occupations assigned, and a brief training period would prepare the escapee for the journey that could either save or cost them their lives. Nevertheless, the chance to escape was worth the risk.

During that time, the station and the surrounding area acquired a reputation as the “Casablanca in the Pyrenees” due to its serving as a key crossing point for goods, as well as being a center of espionage for Nazi and Spanish authorities. Spain was officially neutral, but they had formed an operational agreement with the Wehrmacht, therefore freight trains carried mined tungsten northwards while French grain, as well as trans-shipped Swiss gold, was transported southwards. To me, being neutral should mean that you don’t help either side, but apparently, it is all about doing what profits the neutral nation, no matter who it hurts. According to Ramón Javier Campo Fraile, a Canfranc station historian, “‘In the first years of the war, from 1940 to 1942, thousands of Jews (and non-Jews) fled by train through Canfranc to Lisbon and the United States.’ Among those were painters Marc Chagall and Max Ernst. American entertainer Josephine Baker exited France through the Canfranc train station. Traveling the other way were spies that used the station to join the French resistance or pass messages to Allied contacts. But in November 1942, the Nazis took control of the area and escape through Canfranc became difficult. The station was the site of many arrests.” While it may have been beautiful on the outside, the station held many secrets. Some of them were good and others were bad.

While the station returned to normal after the war, operations there came to an abrupt halt on March 1970, when a train derailment on the Pau-Canfranc railway line demolished the L’Estanguet bridge, on the French side of the Pyrénées Mountains. The national railway company SNCF put great financial pressure on France, and the French government decided not to rebuild the bridge, which effectively forced the closure of the cross-border line. Nevertheless, the station remained open, served by just two daily Spanish trains and a handful of rail replacement buses from the French side. As a consequence of the through route’s abrupt termination, the population of the village of Canfranc declined sharply over the following years. By 2013, the station was closed except for guided tours between July and August of each year, ending in 2017.

The government of Aragon has owned the station since 2013, and it was their desire to rehabilitate the station. They planned to convert the main station building into a hotel, which meant that a new station would be built in the former freight halls to replace the old station. There have been explorations of options to reopen the through line as the “western trans-Pyrenean line” but this initiative would require the assistance of the government of Aquitaine, the adjacent French region. In February 2020, it was announced that funding from the European Union had been made available for the purpose of reopening the through line and relaunching international services.

Architects Joaquín Magrazó and Fernando Used, as of 2018 were preparing designs to transform the station building into a hotel in conjunction with the government of Aragon and the Barceló Hotel Group. As announced, the new station building was constructed behind the original one, with access provided through the hotel vestibule. The exterior of the old station was restored, and interior was reinforced in 2020. The tracks surrounding the old station were dismantled, and the area was transformed into roads and parks. Proposals also called for a 200-seat conference center, a branch of the regional railway museum, shops, and a pilgrim refuge, as Canfranc lies on one of the routes to Santiago de Compostela.