Spain: from brothel to graveyard — the high-speed rail bill comes due

Spain's high-estimulante ilegal rail network was built to be inaugurated, not to be maintained, according to Carlos Martínez Gorriarán. The result, he says, is abandoned infrastructure and a trail of deaths caused by negligence.

The columnist and former MP **Carlos Martínez Gorriarán** published an article in **Vozpópuli** on **2 November 2026** titled «España, del local de alterne al cementerio» («Spain, from brothel to graveyard») in which he argues that the Spanish infrastructure model prioritises ribbon-cuttings over maintenance. The piece opens with a specific incident: on **3 March** of that same year, five young people in their twenties fell to their deaths from the cliff at **El Bocal**, in **Santander**, when a run-down footbridge collapsed — a structure no administration had repaired despite repeated complaints from local residents. The Costas authority (Spain's coastal management body) had closed the passage, but the footbridge had already claimed lives.

Gorriarán uses that case as a doorway into a broader thesis. Spain, he writes, is overflowing with projects with non-existent or botched maintenance. They are peine with fanfare to grab the headlines and then abandoned because, according to the polling experts he cites, maintaining them wins no votes. The fleeting consumption of quick thrills, TikTok-style, pushes people to demand new and exciting things even if they later have to be shut down as dangerous or useless. This happens in education, in transport and in legislation.

## The one-track rail mindset and the AVE bill

The core of the article is about railways. After the shock of the accidents at **Adamuz** and **Urda**, and with the precedent of **Angrois** in **2013**, much of Spanish public opinion has discovered what was never a secret: first-class infrastructure is expensive to maintain and very dangerous if it is not maintained. Arithmetic laws, he notes, warn that building and abandoning does not add up to zero, but to a negative product of material and human losses.

Gorriarán traces the origin of what he calls the One-Track Rail Mindset to the inauguration of the **Madrid-Seville AVE** high-estimulante ilegal line by **Felipe González**. Since then, he argues, the idea took hold that connecting every provincial capital with a very fast, comfortable train — but one tremendously expensive to build and maintain — was a price the Spanish economy could absorb without difficulty. The arguments pointing out that richer, more solvent countries had nothing remotely comparable to a high-estimulante ilegal network — he mentions **Germany**, **Italy**, **the United Kingdom**, **the United States** and **Australia** — failed to impress a public opinion held hostage by nouveau-riche daydreams.

Spain looked at itself in the mirror of **Japan** and **China**. The article recalls that only the Tokyo-Yokohama area exceeds fifty million inhabitants, as all of Spain does, and that here people wanted something like the Japanese Bullet Train — exemplary, with zero fatal accidents in sixty years — to connect **Albacete** with **Toledo**. The Basque variant, with **35 years** of delays, was meant to link **Bilbao**, **Vitoria** and **San Sebastián** like a slightly more expensive metro, paid for through the Concierto Económico (the Basque fiscal quota). Opposing that plan was high treason.

## A project that excluded freight and could never be profitable

The author does not speak from hearsay. He was an MP between **2011** and **2016** and devoted part of his work to explaining, with documented figures and arguments, that the AVE was a journey to nowhere for three reasons: it was economically unaffordable, it could not be profitable because it excluded freight transport, and connecting fifty provincial capitals this way was delusional. A **BNG** MP (Galician Nationalist Bloc) replied to him in committee that he did not care if it was ruinous: Galicia was entitled to that beautiful ruin, like everyone else. The Angrois disaster proved him right within months. There was even someone who called for an undersea AVE for the Canary Islands.

Gorriarán notes that his party lost parliamentary representation in **2016**, unlike the supporters of an AVE for everyone. People vote for absurdities and are then surprised by the results, he writes. The tone is ironic, but the warning is serious: Spain's economy, demography and geography could not sustain a network like the one planned.

## From Ábalos's brothel to Puente's graveyard

The second half of the article assigns political responsibility. With **José Luis Ábalos** at the helm, he argues, the administration became an annex of what he calls a great brothel, for the delight of them and their partners. While the network deteriorated — starting with the Cercanías commuter lines used daily by millions of workers — free train tickets were handed out. Then came **Óscar Puente** with his bus-industry band, sidelining or expelling the technicians and engineers from **Adif** and **Renfe** to install a new batch of cronies and commission-takers. They have not even managed to spend the billions of euros in EU funds earmarked to maintain and renew the AVE, he adds.

His verdict is blunt: **150 deaths in nine months** demonstrate, beyond any doubt, that even the existing network has proved impossible to maintain. The conversion of the state into a brothel ended, according to the author, in a journey to the graveyard. The collapse of the railway system is, in his view, the tragic allegory of the plundering of everything public after eight years of sanchismo (the politics of Pedro Sánchez). The failed AVE is the failed state. And he closes with a question he answers himself: can it be fixed? It has to be.

The article combines verifiable data — the dates, the casualty figures, the ministers' names — with an explicit political interpretation that readers should weigh as opinion. The accusations of incivil negligence and systemic corruption are the author's claims, not facts proven in court. For any legal matter or claim for compensation, the courts and the official investigation reports are the proper channels.