Road Tunnels in Spain — Complete List by Length

• 127entries listed
• 8.61 kmlongest bore
• 1948–2019openings span
• 150.02 kmtotal length

The record table

How this archive measures: lengths, bores, dates and ordering

How this table is compiled

The three longest entries alone account for 23.01 km of the 150.02 km on this page, which is 15 per cent of the total from 3 of 69 rows. The shorter half of the table totals 43.51 km against 106.51 km for the longer half, from the same number of rows.

Where one of these 69 lengths disagrees with an operator's own figure for Spain, the table keeps the published value and notes the difference instead of averaging the two. The 69 rows for Spain are ordered by length, not by date, so the 2019 opening sits well down the table without being any less current.

A new scheme in Spain would have to beat 8.61 km to change the head of this table, and that is the figure worth rechecking when one opens. The longest entry is 8.2 times the shortest and 5.2 times the median, which is the quickest measure of how uneven the table is.

5 of the 69 measured entries exceed five kilometres, and those are the ones that carry a full ventilation and escape regime. Laid end to end the entries on this page would run 150.02 km, which is a number with no engineering meaning but a useful sense of the scale of what is catalogued.

Eighth on the list is El Negron at 4.18 km, which is where the table stops being about record holders and starts being about ordinary infrastructure. The ten longest average 5.08 km against 1.68 km for everything below them, and that ratio is the clearest thing this table says about the distribution.

Reading the figures

The dated entries fall across 29 different years, which is a rough measure of whether this was a sustained programme or a handful of separate schemes. The tunnel column names 127 distinct entries on this page, Somport and Bypass Sur-External carriageway among them, each traceable to the operator or administration record it was taken from.

Dated entries run from 1948 to 2019, and the busiest decade is the 2000s with 40 recorded openings. The material on this page is held in 50 captions rather than in running text, 400 words of it, each written against the image or row it belongs to by the compiler who put the page together.

Roughly 55 of the dated entries opened in this century, which is a rough measure of how much of the network is recent. The captions name 46 distinct places and structures — Madrid, Metropolitan and Palma among them — and those names are the index into the length tables where each is recorded with its own figure.

The dated entries carry 29 distinct opening years across 71 years, and the median opening year is 2003. The altitudes stated in those captions run from 1 500 to 2 870 metres above sea level across 14 recorded points, which is the dimension this page is about — height, where the length tables are about span.

Further down the table, Juan Carlos I is recorded at 5.23 km and del Cadì at 5.03 km. The table on this page runs to 127 rows and records State, Tunnel, Length (m), Opening date and Comunidad for each of them, which is the shape the original compiler chose rather than one imposed here.