The death toll from Wednesday morning’s high-speed train collision in central Spain has risen to 68, regional officials confirmed on Wednesday evening — hours after rescue teams were still pulling bodies from the wreckage near the town of Urda, in Toledo province.
Emiliano García-Page, president of the Castilla-La Mancha region, announced the revised figure and warned it could climb further. “We are speaking of approximately 68 dead, but this is probably going to grow even more,” he told reporters at the scene. Regional officials said 58 people were in hospital, 15 of them in a very serious condition, while other reports put the total number of injured above 80.
The crash happened at 8:54 a.m. local time at kilometre 118 of the Madrid–Seville high-speed line, between the towns of Urda and Los Yébenes, about 120 kilometres south of Madrid. A Renfe AVE service travelling from Madrid to Seville ran into the back of an Iryo train that had stopped on the same track. Two of the Iryo train’s carriages derailed and plunged down an embankment, scattering twisted metal across the slope below.
The two trains were carrying 544 people between them. The Iryo service had left Madrid’s Puerta de Atocha station at 7:54 a.m. with 147 passengers; the Renfe train departed six minutes later carrying 397. Forty of the dead were travelling on the Iryo train and 24 on the Renfe service, according to the regional government’s delegation.
What caused the collision is now the central question — and the transport minister’s account points to a failure in the very system designed to prevent it. Óscar Puente told a press conference in Madrid that the signalling system blacked out near Urda station at around 8:30 a.m., automatically halting all services along a 40-mile stretch of track. The Iryo train stopped on the orders of infrastructure manager Adif because of the signal fault. The Renfe train was then authorised to continue — despite a red signal and a stationary train ahead — in what investigators are examining as a possible human error by a traffic controller.
“An erroneous decision was made to restart the train,” Puente said, describing how the Renfe service was allowed to proceed after the signalling failure. The exact chain of decisions is under investigation, and officials have stressed that the cause has not been formally established.
Passengers described a sudden, violent impact. Miguel Ángel Pérez Laguna, travelling in a rear carriage of the Renfe train, told Capital Radio: “The impact was incredibly strong,” describing parts of the Iryo train’s bodywork being thrown through the air. Another passenger, Ignacio Relaño, told state broadcaster TVE that his train had stopped briefly before moving forward again and hitting the Iryo service. “We all felt the train abruptly slowing down and then the impact,” he said. “The car leaned to one side like it was about to tip over. I hit my nose, everything went flying, luggage, cell phones. Everything shook.”
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said he was “shocked by the serious train accident” and cancelled his scheduled engagements to follow the emergency response. Political parties across Spain suspended campaign activities, and the Royal Spanish Football Federation postponed 24 Copa del Rey matches scheduled for Wednesday night in solidarity with the victims. Rail services between Madrid, Ciudad Real and Andalusia remained suspended as rescue work continued into the evening.
The disaster is the second deadly high-speed rail collision in Spain this year. In January, a crash between trains run by the same two operators near Adamuz, in Córdoba province, killed 46 people and triggered a debate about investment in railway maintenance. Wednesday’s crash is now the deadliest train disaster in Spain since 80 people died at Santiago de Compostela in 2013, when a high-speed train derailed on a sharp bend.
That record matters because Spain’s high-speed network has been a point of national pride — the largest in Europe and the second largest in the world, built on a safety record that, until this year, had seen no fatal crash on its dedicated high-speed lines since the network opened in 1992. Two fatal collisions in ten months, on the same Madrid–Seville corridor, will now force uncomfortable questions about signalling, staffing and oversight — and they arrive a month before Spaniards vote in a snap general election on November 29, with the government’s handling of rail safety already under scrutiny after January.
For now, the priority at Urda is grim and immediate: rescue workers are still searching the wreckage for survivors and bodies, and officials have made clear the toll of 68 is not final. See our earlier report on the crash for the first hours of the disaster.
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