Hi all -- I've been staring at bus and train schedules for more hours than I care to admit, trying to figure out my (sane) options for getting around. I have 13 days that I plan to spend between Madrid and environs and Andalucia. I would have liked to get in the Costa del Sol, but it may not be practical.

OK, enough rambling, some specific questions:

1. When I read that a bus or train station can hold luggage, can I generally assume that they can take a big piece of luggage? Or am I risking arriving in town and having no place to stow my monster bag?

2. From Madrid as a day trip, is it possible to see El Escorial and Segovia in the same day? Is it reasonable? They seem so close that I'd think it'd make more sense to see them both, or perhaps go to El Escorial and overnight in Segovia.

3. OK, obscure question. From staring at train schedules I figured out that Bobadilla has the slower trains and Antequera services the high-speed routes. But now I see that there are two Antequera RENFE stations, the main (slow) one and Antequera - Santa Ana for the AVE. Are these next to each other so that I can connect by walking? I'm looking at a routing from Ronda to Cordoba that connects into Ante, out of Ante-SA.

4. Is there any central repository for all bus schedules? It seems many bus lines don't even have a web page, and there are so many I can't be sure I've found all the routes. I've been variously trying to decide if I can reasonably see Ronda, or Costa del Sol towns such as Tarifa, Gibraltar, Mijas, and Nerja. My current thought, to avoid feeling like I'm living in a bus or train, is to skip all of the above except Nerja, which I'll do as a painful day trip from Nerja.

I should mention that I fly into Madrid, out of Granada at the end, so I need to end up there. Or change my return flight.

Thanks very much for any help! And I loved the map of Spain's upcoming AVE lines over the next several years -- made me very jealous that they're not completed yet!

Thanks,
-- Ethan

Hey, Ethan!

Have a look at Continental-Auto . They're pretty inexpensive ... as I recall, cost me €13 from Soria to Madrid last year!

Generally speaking I would say yes, the bus and train stations can hold big pieces of luggage (but I don't know if they can hold a bag with, say, a grand piano inside, though)

By car it is definitely possible, by train or bus is much more difficult. They are not too far one from the other, but there is a sierra in the middle. Apart of that, the train line that goes from Madrid to El Escorial is the Avila line, not the Segovia line. Here you have a map of the Madrid Short Distance Line System (called Cercanias). There you can see that the point to transfer lines is Villalba. For schedules, here you have the Cercanias Madrid page (in Spanish only)


The straight line to go from Ronda to Cordoba is using the high-speed line that goes through Antequera-Santa Ana station. However, if the schedule of the only daily high-speed service (6:11p dep - 7:56p arr) doesn't fit you, the way to do the same trip but transferring lines is via Bobadilla, not Antequera. Here you have the map of RENFE's Regional Lines (NOT high-speed) in Andalucia, so you can graphically see what I mean.

From Ronda to Bobadilla you have 4 trains:
7:52a (dep) - 8:41a (arr) (daily but Sun)
9:03a - 9:54a (daily)
2:06p - 3:02p (daily)
5:20p - 6:11p (daily)

From Bobadilla to Cordoba there are 5 trains:
6:10a - 7:54a (Mon to Fri)
8:05a - 9:35a (daily)
4:00p - 5:36p (daily)
9:25p - 10:50p (daily)
9:45p - 11:22p (Tue, Thu and Sun)

The only reasonable connection I see is the one I mark bold...

The closest thing to that is Movelia , but the list of routes and companies is not exhaustive.

Thanks for the detailed reply! And no, I'm not carrying a grand in my checked bag. Not even a baby grand.

The El Escorial to Segovia question doesn't seem quite that easy. I followed the Cercanias links you gave, but it seems that El Escorial is on the Cercanias but Segovia is too far, and Villalba has two different stations, one for Cercancias and one (Villalba de Guadarr...) for RENFE. Using bahn.hafas.de it seems like, unless I'm on the 12:12-14:02 RENFE routing I'd best not bother. Somehow I doubt I can see El Escorial and be done by then.

Moving down to Andalucia -- I've seen that Andalucia regional RENFE map before, thanks to other threads in this forum. They are correct for the typical routes, but that are routings that break the mold, such as one train direct from Ronda to Malaga and one from Ronda to Cordoba. Also there are many trains from Cordoba to Malaga, and two to Granada.

But it still leaves me confused as to exactly where Antequera Santa Ana is. The Dutch .nl map seems to imply that it is right next to the Bobadilla station, but that's not stated anywhere. And the map you point to doesn't even mention Santa-Ana.

So I guess let me be precise: can I get quickly and easily from Ant S-A to either Bob or Ante?

The routing I had been looking at was:

Ronda 9:02 -> Antequera 10:09
Antequera S-A 10:23 -> Cordoba 11:05

But it seems like the two Antequera are not related. Now I'm just curious is Bob and AS-A are neighbors.


Finally, on buses, I checked out Movelia but it couldn't find routes that I know exist on Los Amarillos and Portillo. I just got Comes -- but it showed me more trips on Comes than the Comes own listings did, which makes me a bit nervous.


There's something fun in the anal retentive ways I've been staring down all these routings. I've particularly enjoyed mistranslations by the Google automatic translation, namely "Comes" -> "He eats" and "AVE" -> "Bird".

Sorry -- I retract my claim about the buses not being on Comes's site. I found them under a routing I hadn't looked at before.

Well, I know that the RENFE Website is pretty messy, and that is what is I am here for (just joking, I am not related to RENFE whatsoever). RENFE is internally divided into Business Units that seem not to communicate well among themselves. There are three B.U.'s associated with lines: High-speed/Long Distance, Mid-distance (also called Regionales), and Cercanias (commuter trains in and around big cities, kind of BART in SF)

The station at Villalba is unique, despite RENFE-Cercanias calls it Villalba, and RENFE-Regionales calls it Villalba de Guadarrama (the full name of the village). So, don't worry about that because I swear that there is only one station in Villalba. The trick comes because this is the only village with that name in Madrid province (so Cercanias does not have any other station which could be confusing), but there are other Villalbas in Spain, so Regionales use its 'last name', too.

About Antequera, Antequera-Santa Ana, and Bobadilla:

The Dutch are right, Ant-SA is much closer to Bob. than to Ant. Ant-SA does not appear in the map I gave the link, because I said that the map was about RENFE's Regional Lines (NOT high-speed) in Andalucia, and Ant-SA is a brand new station (less than 6 months old) created to serve the high-speed lines only. In its environment there is a gauge changer that allows trains to move from the high-speed railway to the regular railway.

Forget about the routing you had been looking:
Antequera and Antequera-Santa Ana are pretty far from each other (about 8 miles). I called RENFE and got the phone number of Bobadilla station (+34-952720022, jus in case anyone else needs it) and they told me that Bob and Ant-SA are about 3 miles away from each other. The only way to go between both is taking a taxi, and both have taxi service available. Until the high-speed line from Ant-SA to Ronda is built (lñast month it was raised the bid for its construction), there won't be any train that passes through both Ant-SA and Bob.

Hope this helps.

And thank you for being here!

It's good to hear that the Villalba stations are all the same. It might be practical after all, since there are a lot more Cercanias trains from El Escorial than Regionales.

And thanks for calling about Antequera Santa-Ana. It seems highly unlikely but at least I know that I can get between Santa-Ana and Bob.

A new weirdness is at hand. Using bahn.hafas.de I checked schedules from Linares/Baeza. It shows a train ARC 697 as going both to Malaga and to Seville. I can pull up two different ARC 697 schedules that show it diverging in Cordoba, one turning south the other continuing west.

Is this a deal where the train is split down the middle and some cars go one way, some the other? Or is there an error or an unlisted train change?

Thanks again!
-- Ethan

That's nothing weird about that train, from my point of view at least. And you have found only two different schedules of that train... but there are more of them.

ARC 697 is "ARCO Federico Garcia Lorca" train. It links Barcelona with the main Andalusian cities, and even Badajoz in Extremadura, daily. It departs from Barcelona at 8a, goes via Valencia and Albacete until Alcazar de San Juan, where it arrives at 2:27p. There, the train is splitted for the first time: one branch goes Westbound to Badajoz (arr 10:05p), and the main one continues Southbound to Linares-Baeza (4:34p arrival).

At Linares-Baeza, the train is splitted again. The main branch continues to Cordoba and, depending on the day, the Southeastbound branch goes either to Almeria (Mon,Thu,Sat, arr 8:25p) or Granada (Wed,Fri,Sun, arr 7:39p).

And, finally, at Cordoba (arr 6:10p) the train splits definitely, one branch going to Sevilla (arr 7:55p), and the other one to Malaga (arr 9:10p).

So, that's why there are five different schedules for the same train.

Thanks for that! I assume that they will get you in the right car when you reserve the tickets. 8-) Otherwise it might get exciting...