The ghosts of Europe's past, present, and future

In the midst of the Pyrenees range of Spain lies a relic of history that continues to attract visitors to the scenic valley of Canfranc in Asturias. One of the most beautiful rail stations in the world, that served as a location for the filming of “Doctor Zhivago,’ lies mouldering in the a valley that for centuries served as a way station for pilgrims crossing the mountains from France as they made their way to the shrine of St. James the Apostle at the eponymous city of Santiago de Compostela. Situated in the province of Huesca, in what was once the Kingdom of Aragon, Canfranc (‘field of foreigners’) lies in the vertiginous valley of the Aragón river.

Few places in Europe are as evocative of the past, and the tangled international interests of Continental governments, their pomp and misplaced optimism. Inaugurated with pomp and circumstance on July 18, 1928 by King of Spain Alfonso XIII and Gaston Doumergue President of France, the station at Canfranc was at the time the largest train station in Europe, surpassing even St. Pancras station in London. No doubt the two heads of state believed then that national sovereignty, and the principle that good borders make good neighbours, would always be true and that their monument to those raisons d’etat would always stand to attest their memory.

Certainly, nothing was spared in engineering the railways that led to the station nor in the building itself which was to become an exemplar of Art Nouveau. Created by Spanish architect Fernando Ramírez de Dampierre, construction continued from 1921 to 1925. It was decided that the station would be built in Spain since the terrain in nearby France would have been impossible. The station measures some 750 feet long, with 75 doors on each side and more windows than days in a year.

Lying at an altitude of 4,000 feet, the station is surrounded by verdant wooded slopes and snowy peaks that tower twice that height as the Aragón river rushes below. A mile of the river had to be re-dug in a straight line, and the whole valley blasted and excavated to protect the station from avalanches and rockfalls.
The railways leading to the station took decades to complete and continued through the First World War. The tunnel connecting the Gallic republic to Spain took four years with the technology of the time to break through some 5 miles of solid rock. When the diggers from Spain and France finally breached the mountain in 1912, they shouted together “The Pyrenees are no more!” Twenty-three further tunnels and three viaducts were needed to complete the project in one of the most significant engineering feats of Europe. It was thus that Spain entered the modern era.

The station’s two platforms are long enough for three full-length passenger trains, and between them a three-storey building longer than London’s Westminster Palace built in carved stone in the style of 19th Century France. It has a high, slate roof crowned by three domes, one at each end and one in the middle. The building is reached through tunnels beneath the railway, down staircases with white marble balustrades. The hotel reception at the station remains breathtaking after decades of neglect and generations of pigeon dung, boasting a grand flight of stairs sweeping up to the floors above.

The eastern platform, with an ornate roof supported by decorated iron pillars and illuminated by then-modern electric lighting, was for French trains on French-gauge rails. The identical western platform was for Spanish trains on their outsize gauge. Above both hangs the station sign in Art Nouveau lettering. It has two identical customs and immigration halls with soaring cathedral ceilings. Passengers waited at mahogany counters with wooden rails on which their suitcases could be inspected by customs. Still to be seen are the marble crests bearing the arms of the Kingdom of Spain and the Republic of France. The ornate ceilings are faced in pressed zinc. All of this was state-of-the-art in 1928 and was the boast of the two nations involved.

The station was to survive the Crash of 1929 but never carried the amount of passenger and freight traffic expected as other rail crossings to France at Irún and Port Bou emerged with time. But it was following the victory of Francisco Franco and during the Second World War that Canfranc station was to once again to make history. The mountains of Iberia, where stout Basques have fashioned swords and armor for centuries for export to Europe, also yield minerals that Nazi Germany needed for its military build-up before and during the conflict. Spain provided the conduit for tungsten, a metal also known as wolfram that was used to strengthen the armor of Nazi Panzer tanks used to such devastating effect in expanding Germany’s Lebensraum. Through the Canfranc station passed the rare earth of Portuguese origin on its way to Germany’s burgeoning Wehrmacht.

In return for the grey and lustrous metal, payment from Adolf Hitler came in the form of gold bars that thus circumvented the economic embargo imposed by the Allies. Approximately 50 gold shipments passed through Canfranc, reaching some 86.6 metric tons, between the summer of 1942 and the winter of 1943 while Nazis were still enjoying a heyday. In 2009 terms, the value of the gold would be approximately $1.4 billion.

In 2000, a French bus operator found a treasure trove of documents abandoned at the station’s customs office that noted the arrival of gold shipments originating in then-occupied Belgium and The Netherlands. But not all of the gold remained in Franco’s Spain. At Canfranc, the gold was loaded on heavily-guarded truck convoys that made their way not only to Franco’s coffers, but also dictator Antonio Salazar’s Portugal, and Bolivia.

Canfranc station makes the visitor mindful not only of high affairs of state and finance, but human drama as well. The immense quays at the station are now silent witnesses to intrigues where refugees from Vichy France and the rest of Europe had to throw themselves at the mercy of Spanish customs officials. Many of these refugees were Europe’s Jews who sought refuge in Spain, which once expelled them as undesirable, rather than face the Nazi death camps and cooperative Vichy government. British secret agents smuggled people and information through the rail station, too. It is melancholic to contemplate that this was the period when the station operated most successfully for human cargo. Little remains of the human detritus of the period.

After the titanic struggle between the Allies and the Axis, the fortunes of Spain and Canfranc station were to suffer. The town of Canfranc, which grew during the decades of building and digging, burned in 1944, after which the villagers left to found the town of nearby Canfranc Estación. The current population at Canfranc proper is 77.

In March 1970, a French train coming from Bedous fell off a bridge on its way to Canfranc and fell into a river. Following decades of little use, this was the perfect excuse for the French rail system to close its portion of the rail link that had been opened 42 years before. The costly tunnel between France and Spain is now closed and, while the French have closed the tunnel and their portion of the rails, the stubborn Spanish maintain their segment leading to the abandoned station. It is still possible to take the train out of Zaragoza to Canfranc and to admire the alpine views on the way. Skiers can lodge nearby as they launch themselves down the slopes at Candanchú and Astún.

Lying around the station is rusting rail stock where alpine flowers emblazon antique railcars and engines. Inside the station and its hotel there are to see the lonely hallways littered with the plaster flaking from ceilings, broken tiles and stone.

The station has been the subject of numerous campaigns for restoration and is now undergoing a desultory restoration process. Access to the station itself is now barred while works are in process. But tourists still slip through the barriers to get a glimpse of its 19th century style grandeur. While Spain is undergoing an economic downturn as aid from the EU is waning, it remains to be seen whether the millions of Euros needed for a thorough re-building will ever materialize. The station is shrouded now with scaffolding as restoration work is done.

The visitor to Canfranc station may profitably spend a few hours there while visiting the splendid forests and rock outcrops, or continuing on his way in pilgrimage to Santiago. It is at Canfranc where he will find the ghosts of Europe: past, present, and future. For it is here where Europe’s varying self-images converge at the place statesmen in 1928 dedicated a building in the imperial style of a dead century that enshrined rail travel. The Great War had ended and Spain’s kinglet and France’s prime minister could not imagine that it could be surpassed by an even deadlier catastrophe. Even so, they must have brimmed with optimism that the millions of francs and pesetas spent would somehow augur well.

The ghost of Europe’s present offers the practical elimination of borders wrought by the Schengen Treaty, a negative ratio of births to deaths, and the influx of militant Islam. Little did King Alfonso, Francisco Franco, or Adolf Hitler envision these facts. Even now, Europe’s leaders and its burgeoning bureaucracy at Strasbourg make their plans and spend millions in the hope that a salutory ghost of Europe’s future will emerge. What awaits Europe is still obscured and can only be guessed at by demographers, poets, and holy men who see the headlight of an oncoming train.