Spain will begin three days of mourning on Tuesday as rescuers continue to comb through the wreckage of twisted train cars and scattered debris to locate victims after a train collision that killed at least 40 people and injured dozens.
On Monday, more than 18 hours after a high-speed train carrying about 300 Madrid-bound passengers derailed and collided with an oncoming train, people across the country were still scrambling to make contact with missing loved ones caught up in Spain’s worst rail disaster in more than a decade.
Juan Barroso said five members of his extended family had been among the nearly 200 people heading from Madrid to the southern city of Huelva by train. In the aftermath of the collision near Adamuz in Córdoba province, just one of them, a six-year-old child, had been accounted for.
“Now we’re searching for the four who are missing,” Barroso told reporters. “We’ve been all over. All of the hospitals in Jaén, Úbeda and in Córdoba.”
Others used social media to post photos of their loved ones, pleading for people to get in touch. “If anyone in Adamuz recognises this man, he’s my father, please contact me,” read one message.
Police said they had opened several offices where people could file reports and “provide DNA samples for the purpose of identification”.
Speaking to reporters during a visit to the site, the country’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, vowed that the investigation into the cause of the crash would be full and transparent.
“Spanish society, like all of us, is wondering what happened, how it happened, how this tragedy could have occurred,” he said on Monday as he declared three days of mourning starting at midnight . “And I’m convinced that time and the work of experts will provide us with those answers.”
The collision occurred just before 8pm on Sunday night, when the rear part of the Madrid-bound train came off the rails and into the path of an oncoming train.
The impact knocked the first two carriages of the southbound train off the track, sending it plummeting down a 4-metre (13ft) slope, said Spain’s transport minister, Óscar Puente.
While the cause of the accident had yet to be established, Puente described it as “really strange” that a derailment had happened on a straight stretch of track. This particular section had been renovated in May, he added.
The train that derailed was less than four years old and had been inspected four days earlier, Iryo, the private company that operated the train, said in a statement on Monday.
The president of the state rail company, Renfe, Álvaro Fernández Heredia, said it was too early to talk about the cause. But he noted that the accident had taken place in “strange conditions”, telling the broadcaster Cadena Ser that “human error is practically ruled out”.
A source told Reuters that technicians had identified a broken joint on the rails, which they said had created a gap between the rail sections that widened as trains continued to travel on the track. The faulty joint could prove important in identifying the precise cause of the accident, the source added.
Neither Adif, the state-owned rail infrastructure administrator, nor the Spanish commission tasked with investigating rail accidents replied to requests for comment.
Since 2022, Adif has publicly flagged 10 infrastructure issues in the area where the collision occurred, from signalling failures to issues with overhead power lines. In August, the union representing train drivers said in a letter that increased rail traffic had led to severe wear and tear on the tracks, resulting in frequent breakdowns and train damage.
On Monday the train drivers’ union called for caution in linking their earlier warning to the crash, stressing that the cause of the collision remained unknown.
As reports of the collision began circulating on Sunday evening, emergency officials rushed to the remote area where it took place.
Grappling with darkness and largely limited by the single-track road that leads to and from the site, they worked through the night to pull people out of the wreckage. Some passengers managed to slip out of overturned carriages and twisted masses of steel on their own, using emergency hammers to break through windows.
The mayor of Adamuz, Rafael Moreno, told Europa Press that he was among the first to arrive at the scene. “It was horrific,” he said. “It was a tremendously tough, sad night.”
The small Andalucían town, which sits in the countryside a few kilometres from the crash site, was in shock on Monday.
The town’s municipal hall had been turned into a hastily improvised response centre where many of the victims of the accident had been brought for first aid, food and warmth before being taken elsewhere.
Officials warned the death toll was likely to rise. The head of the Andalucían government, Juanma Moreno, told the broadcaster Cope: “Some carriages are in a very deteriorated, very regrettable state. I’m told it’s a twisted wreck, which makes things very difficult. We have to use mechanical means and heavy machinery.”
He said the search area had been widened beyond the crash site. “The impact was so incredibly violent that we have found bodies hundreds of metres away, which means that people were thrown through the windows.”
The accident shook Spain, where the cutting-edge rail network has long been a source of pride. With almost 4,000km of track, Spain’s high-speed railway network is the largest in Europe and the second in the world after China, according to Adif.
In 2024, Renfe said more than 25 million passengers had travelled on its high-speed trains.
