About us

What madridmetro.org is

A guide to the Madrid metro written by people who do not run it. There is a page for each line (the 12 metro lines, the Ramal and the ML1 light-rail line: 14 pages) and another for each of the 249 stations, plus the map, first and last trains, fares, the transport card, a journey calculator and how to get to the airport. Neither Metro de Madrid, S.A., nor the Consorcio Regional de Transportes de Madrid (the regional transport authority), nor the Comunidad de Madrid (the regional government) has anything to do with these pages: they do not commission them, do not review them and are not answerable for them. What you find here is their public information rearranged, and whatever you plan to do with a figure, the operator’s website always has the final word.

A scanned PDF behind every timetable

This is the part of the work almost nobody imagines. Metro de Madrid publishes the timetables for the current season in 34 PDF documents, one per line and direction, and they are scanned pages: they have no text layer. They cannot be copied or searched. To get the first and last train for every station out of them, they had to be run through optical character recognition, the geometry of each table rebuilt by hand, and the cells where the recognition hesitated checked by eye; nine remained illegible, none of them a first or last train. Before that there is another, less visible obstacle: the metromadrid.es firewall returns an «access not available» page to any automated reader that does not present the full set of headers of a real browser, so even the line pages have to be requested in a particular way.

The practical consequence, and the reason for mentioning it: what you see on a station page is not a text somebody wrote once; it is the result of rebuilding the dataset every time the source changes. An old time cannot survive just because nobody rewrote the paragraph around it.

The data sheet, source by source

• Lines, stations, order and interchanges. The operator’s own line pages on metromadrid.es and, as a second official source, the Consorcio’s open-data layer on its ArcGIS server. A list of stations is only accepted when the two agree.
• Coordinates, fare zone, municipality, district and section lengths. The Consorcio’s open data. OpenStreetMap relations are used to cross-check order and position (no station is more than 300 metres from its node), never as a source.
• First and last train. The 34 PDFs described above.
• Frequency. The table of intervals by time band that the operator publishes for each line. It tells you how often a train comes, not the time of a particular train, and the difference matters.
• Times between stations. 278 of the 288 pairs come from the passing times in those same official timetables. Eight come from the Metro Ligero GTFS and two from the expired 2025 GTFS, and they are marked as such.
• Fares. The BOCM no. 311 of 31 December 2025 (the regional official gazette), which is the regulation setting the 2026 prices, cross-checked against the Consorcio’s ticket pages. The fares page on metromadrid.es is out of date (it still carries 2025 discounts and a tourist ticket at €10.00), so where they disagree the BOCM and the Consorcio prevail.
• The transport card. The Consorcio’s pages on the Tarjeta Transporte Público Personal and the Multi card, their FAQs, and the BOCM for the price of the card itself and of replacements.
• Accessibility, entrances and services. The station page on the operator’s website, which is what decides whether it carries the «accessible station» icon, plus the Consorcio’s accessibility grade.
• What is nearby. Named places from OpenStreetMap within 400 metres at most, filtered by category. 237 of the 249 stations have at least one; twelve have nothing catalogued and their page says so. The distance is in a straight line, adjusted upwards for walking.
• Opening dates and former names. The Spanish Wikipedia, and only as a cross-check, because the operator does not publish opening dates station by station.
• The map. A diagram by Wikimedia Commons contributors licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, not the official one, which is protected. Author and licence appear below the map and in the legal notice.

Five things this site does not publish

1. When your train will arrive. There is no live connection behind these pages. The board on the home page compares the clock with the published timetable and tells you whether the line is within its service hours; it neither knows nor says whether your train is running late.
2. Today’s disruptions. Long closures announced by the operator are included, with their date. A breakdown this morning is not: that is what metromadrid.es and its notices are for, and an out-of-date alert is worse than none.
3. Travel impressions. No station here is a «must-see» and no neighbourhood is «vibrant», and there is no advice on where to stand on the platform. That is something people who use the line every day know, and we are not them.
4. Figures nobody publishes. How deep a station is, how many passengers enter through it, or the exact minutes of a walking change are not published by any source, and the network’s two passage interchanges (Noviciado with Plaza de España, Acacias with Embajadores) have no official time either. The gap is left in plain sight.
5. Tickets. Nothing is sold here and there are no links to resellers. Tickets are bought in the metro, at tobacconists and in the Consorcio’s apps.

When the operator and the Consorcio say different things

Both sources behind this site are official, and they contradict each other more than would seem reasonable. Everything below is still unresolved today:

• The same name spelt three ways. The operator’s website says «Parque de Lisboa»; the Consorcio, OpenStreetMap and the Commons map say «Parque Lisboa». And the operator does not even agree with itself: its platform displays print «Palas del Rey» and «ARROYO FRESNO» where its website has «Palas de Rey» and «Arroyofresno». We publish the spelling on the operator’s website in all three cases.
• 249 stations here, 303 in the official figure. We count each physical station once: Sol is one, even though three lines stop there. That gives 249 (242 without Metro Ligero 1). The operator publishes 303 because it counts by service section and repeats Estadio Metropolitano, Puerta de Arganda and Tres Olivos. Neither figure is false: they answer different questions, and here you get ours explained and theirs quoted.
• Accessibility: eight stations with two official answers. The operator’s icon and the Consorcio’s grade contradict each other at Plaza de Castilla, Menéndez Pelayo, Avenida de América, Ciudad Lineal, Usera, Príncipe Pío, Begoña and Conde de Casal. We publish the operator’s version, which is the more recent, but if you depend on the lift, confirm it on metromadrid.es before you set out.
• The calculator estimates, and says so. There is no train-by-train daytime timetable for the metro network: only first train, last train and intervals. The Consorcio’s GTFS for the metro is expired (its calendar ended in May 2026) and it also does not include Line 3. So the calculator adds, as waiting time, half of that line’s interval at that hour and warns you that the arrival time is an estimate. The only line with a complete published timetable is Metro Ligero 1, whose GTFS is current.
• The opening dates come from Wikipedia. They have been checked to rule out those that actually belonged to the Cercanías (commuter-rail) station, but they are still an unofficial source. Atocha has been left without a date rather than carry a doubtful one.
• Works in progress. Santiago Bernabéu is closed and Line 10 is cut between Nuevos Ministerios and Cuzco, with a free replacement bus and no published reopening date. The station page, the line page and the home-page board all say so; the Commons map, on the other hand, does not show temporary works.
• The last Line 6 train from Sunday to Thursday is not published. The official sheet cuts the table off at midnight, and the optical recognition read that cut as if it were the last service. Rather than guess, 112 values are left blank.

Telling us about a mistake

A wrong zone, a lift that no longer exists, an extra accent in a station name: let us know. The correction goes into the dataset and not into the sentence you read, so in the same rebuild it reaches the line page, the calculator and the fares table. The contact page is there for that. What cannot be sorted out from here is anything about your journey: lost property, fines, refunds or applications for your card are a matter for the operator and the Consorcio, and sending them to this inbox only delays you.

How this site is funded

By the advertising slots, which pay for the hosting and the hours spent rebuilding the data. There is no other source of income and nothing is paid for: no station appears because someone paid for it, no link earns a commission and no advertiser sees a page before it is published. If that ever changed, the page concerned would say so. Which cookies are needed to serve those ads and how to reject them is explained in the cookie policy.

Who edits it

It is published by David Franco Aguirre under the GoRandom brand, a small independent publisher based in Bilbao. Nobody here lives in Madrid, which is why what is on offer is not first-hand experience but official data, put in order, cross-checked and dated. When a figure is our own estimate, it says so; when two official sources clash, we tell you about the clash.

Last updated: October 2026.