Trip to Canfranc

These are my notes for a trip to Canfranc on the train from Jaca

Aragón: history and importance.

Jaca has the first Romanesque cathedral in Spain, dating from the 11^th cen. This is frontier land and always has been; a place of skirmishes rather than big battles. There is evidence of history going back to prehistoric times- not sure if we can see the dolmen from the train, and there are others in the Selva de Oza. Of course, there’s also the St James Way which runs from Somport to Jaca.

Coll de Ladrones fort at the entrance to the paseo de los melancólicos

The mountains

The Pyrenees are a massive natural barrier some 500kms long and 50kms wide dividing France and the Iberian Peninsula. Access is through the valleys. Looking  at a map, the mountains are like the spine of a comb and the valleys the teeth running parallel to each other and perpendicular to the spine, in Aragón the highest peak is Aneto at 3,400m above sea level. However, in this area the mountains are around the 2000m mark. From Jaca at 820m/sl we’ll be climbing gently to Canfranc at 1,195m/sl, following up the valley of the river Aragón from which the medieval county and later kingdom took its name. The kingdom expanded and became a great commonwealth which included Catalonia, Valencia, Mallorca and Sardinia.

 An important date in later times was 1288, when the Treaty of Canfranc was signed by Alfonso III of Aragón  and Edward I of England. Sons were taken hostage to seal the agreement.

Legends:

There are plenty of legends about the conflict between Christians and the Moors who managed to penetrate all the way to the north of Spain and to the Pyrenees. In Zaragoza and Huesca they had some centuries of coexistence, but here there is only a history of battles and confrontation; (Jaca First Friday of May, Sta Orosia, the Carline thistle).

The railway:

First thought about in mid-19^th cen, the Pau-Canfranc route was considered too difficult and discounted in favour of the Basque coastal route. The French and Spanish governments finally agreed to the construction of a central-Pyrenean railway, and work began in 1904. It was an enormous challenge for engineers and took more than 20 years to complete. In the Aspe valley on the French side, 80 bridges, 4 viaducts, 24 tunnels, and massive deforestation were needed. The treans-Pyrenean bridge is 7,875m long. In Canfranc itself, great thought had to be given to the problem of avalanches, and millions of trees were planted on the slopes. On  18^th August 1928, king Alfonso XIII and French president Gaston Doumergue came here to celebrate the inauguration of the International railway station and the tunnel. The railway line was never profitable. The Great Depression struck in 1929, there was a serious fire in 1931 and in 1936 the Civil War started and the tunnel was closed off. Although it wasn’t opened to civil traffic until 1948, there was special wartime traffic I’ll tell you about later. Trains used the line from Pau to Canfranc until 1970 when a heavy freight train crashed as a French bridge collapsed and was never repaired. They have tried very hard from this side to re-open the line, but there’s resistance from France, they don’t want it.

The station

Built between 1921 and 1925, when it was opened in 1928 it was the biggest railway station in Europe. It is Art Nouveau/Classical/French in style, 241m long, three stories high, with 75 doors on each side and more than 365 windows.  It is made of materials which were fashionable in those times, concrete, steel, glass and marble. As a good international station it had a luxurious hotel, customs offices, an infirmary, bars, restaurants and offices for both the French and Spanish railway companies. Two passenger trains run to and from Canfranc every day, and there are frequent freight trains carrying grain, but the station building is not in use. It has recently had the roof replaced, but the future of this building as a hotel/leisure centre/spa is still uncertain. In 1944, a fire consumed more than half of the houses in the original village of Canfranc, and so the centre of population moved up to the station area  

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Nazi gold.

In 2001, a Frenchman was poking about in one of the station outbuildings and found a pile of papers, which he pieced together to tell an incredible story: between 1943 and 1945, Canfranc station was used to load 45 convoys, 1,200 tonnes every month, including 86 tonnes of gold confiscated from the Jews. Spain sent many tons of wolfram to Germany, and received some 12 tonnes of gold and 4 of opium. The rest of the loads of spoils went to Portugal from where it was sent to South America, where many Germans went after their defeat.

Some German soldiers; engineers, chemists and Gestapo, lived in the station, some in a local hotel. Local people moved the merchandise; their lives were pretty hard in those days.

“P” line 

Franco’s Spain was isolated after the war and there was always a fear of incursions by the Maquis. “P” line was and ambitious defensive project which involved building 10,000 pillboxes through the Pyrenees to prevent this from happening. If we walk along behind the station we will see some.

Over the tunnel mouth and behind the station, we can go onto the footpath called the "paseo de los melancólicos"

.  Paseo de los Melancólicos
It runs parallell to the railway line and the village all the way to the hydroelectric turbines of the Canalroya. In the undergrowth along the way we can see various pillboxes or bunkers which formed part of the "P" line. All work on the line was stopped in 1959, and they were never put to use defensively.
References: http://www.heraldo.es/canfranc/
http://depaseoporcanfranc.blogspot.com.es