Neighbouring countries, separated by the physical barrier of the Pyrenees mountain range (430 km), Spain and France maintain intense trade relations. For obvious geographical reasons, the French territory is also the essential transit route for land-based trade between Spain and other countries of the European Union (excluding Portugal). In 2025, the EU 27 accounted for 62% of all Spanish exports, and 49.4% of its imports.
Source: Spanish Ministry of Economy, Trade and Enterprise.
Analysis of the movement of goods between Spain and the rest of Europe shows a predominance of road freight transport (RFT). However, this tends to decrease with increasing geographical distance from the peninsula.
Source: Franco-Spanish Observatory of Traffic in the Pyrenees (OTP). Created in 1998 during the Franco-Spanish intergovernmental summit in La Rochelle, the OTP was designed as a joint working group bringing together staff from the ministries in charge of transport of both countries.
The figures published by the Franco-Spanish Observatory of Traffic in the Pyrenees (OTP), which cover the year 2023, show the following situation:
In all cases, the weight of rail transport is negligible. It represents less than 1% of the total transport flows between Spain and Europe as a whole.
This situation is historically explained by the difference in track gauge between the Spanish railway network (1,668 mm) and the rest of the European network (1,435 mm, so-called "standard" or UIC gauge). In Spain, however, a historic decision has begun to move things forward: the choice to build high-speed rail lines (HSR) with standard gauge. The first one, Madrid-Seville, entered service in 1992. A large-scale transformation was then initiated. In 2024, 70.5% of the Spanish rail network was Iberian gauge, compared to 80.6% in 2010; 21.9% was standard or mixed gauge, with the remaining 7.6% being metric gauge, according to a report by the National Markets and Competition Commission.
The Spanish strategy is part of a broader framework, that of the Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T) which concerns Spain. This Spanish commitment to infrastructure is accompanied by a desire to develop rail freight, which represents less than 4% of land freight transport, one of the lowest ratios in the EU.
The Spanish government's "Goods 30" plan, aimed at reviving rail freight transport, plans to increase the share of rail in land freight transport to 10% in 2030 compared to 3.6% in 2021.
Several initiatives have been implemented to encourage modal shift, including:
These initiatives, launched at the beginning of this decade, have not borne much fruit so far. But This difficult context should not obscure the existence of regular, high-occupancy cross-border intermodal connections, which demonstrate the existence of demand and therefore a market (...)
CONTENTS
The weight of road freight transport
The specific case of Franco-Spanish flows
The transformation of Franco-Spanish rail corridors
The Mediterranean Corridor: progress that is already measurable
The Atlantic Corridor: an ambitious project
The uncertainties of a connection in the middle of the Pyrenees
The development potential of combined transport
A renewed interest in intermodality
Traffic remains modest
Real potential for development