UK vs. Spain
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Until 1975, Spain was kept firmly under the thumb of the dictator Franco, who seized power at the end of the Spanish Civil War. The delightful Mr Franco held Spain back in a lot of ways, and so when he died and (his named successor) King Juan Carlos took over and founded a democracy, there were big changes. Some are still happening. The most noticable one was the transaction in which Spain sold its soul to tourism, and set about all the naming of Costas, building of vast hotel complexes and expanding of airports that it entailed. Spain also began its love affair with the car, and today has one of the highest proportions of motorway mileage to population - not bad considering it had virtually no motorways in 1977.
Despite EU policy to the contrary, Spain not only manages to have a huge road construction programme, but actually wangles lots of the funding for it from the EU budget. How do they do that? The answer, apparently, is that the EU regards Spain as a poor country, and is therefore willing to hand over bundles of Euros for the Spanish to lay as much tarmac as they like with - this is in order to bring Spanish transport infrastructure up to a European "normal" level. If Spain is only now approaching a European normal, can we have some money for new motorways please?
One major difference from Britain, and probably quite a lot of other countries, is that along with different road sign types for motorways, national roads, and so on, Spain also has signs to be used in urban areas. They use a narrowed Helvetica font, though from the varieties it's possible to see in any one town, it looks like the specification for these was changed regularly. Even in this photo, the bottom sign is of a different design.
The infuriating thing about these is that they override any other road signing. National roads are always signed in huge billboard lettering, but when they hit a town centre these ones take over, with all the text on fun-size boards that are unreadable at speed and rarely appear before a junction.
Outside urban areas, the signing improves vastly. The size of text on road signs increases with the importance of the road, so on National Roads (Carreteras Nacionales) even the narrowest single-carriageway road has signs readable from the moon. Black-and-white signs appear on non-motorway roads, using the British 'Transport' alphabets.
This road gets its number on a green patch, which means very little, and is certainly completely disconnected from the road's letter prefix. Motorways have blue patches but can have any prefix, major Carreteras Nacionales have red patches, and so do a random selection of other roads; some have green patches like this one, some have black on yellow, Autovias have black on orange from time to time and most use black on white for a lot of the time.
This photo is a tolled Spanish autopista - their equivalent of motorways. Just from looking at it, it seems to have a lot of British motorway in its ancestry. The contrast from Italian roads with their narrow lanes and poor capacity is marked.
The colour coding of roads mentioned above leads us on to this: the letter prefix also has little to do with the road you're on. This is an Autopista, which most traditionalists would assume to have an A-prefix. This is the C-33. As well as A- and N- roads, there's a different set of prefixes for every region of Spain, and within that a variety of prefixes for each province. There are numerous overlaps and repeated prefixes. And just to make it even better, C- isn't a region, it's used randomly throughout Catalunya and other Catalan areas for major roads - recently numbered over the top of A-, N- and other roads alike. The best solution is not to assume there's a system at all.
This brings us to Autopistas and Autovias. Autopistas are fast, grade-separated dual carriageways with motorway restrictions. Autovias are fast, grade separated dual carriageways with motorway restrictions. There must be something to separate them, because both are signed differently, but I don't know for the life of me what it is.
Anyway, we're off along the A-7 Autopista now. Signing on these is by far the best in Spain, with the usual blue signs and white text. These signs (and patches on other road signs) should always be in the American 'FHWA' highway font. In an act of staggering ignorance, Autopista SA (the company that runs the tolled roads) has in the last couple of years replaced every single direction sign on the A-7 between Barcelona and the French Border with a shiny new one, every last one of them in Helvetica like the one pictured.
Anyway, a note on the advance signing - the best part of two miles ahead of the exit, there is the first of the 'list' signs for destinations at the next exit. This brand new sign uses a French-style symbol for the exit number, though other signs seemingly erected at the same time use a white box with 'salida' in it instead.
Signage at the actual exit is strikingly similar to the signs on the M8 in Glasgow: when the sliproad appears signs for it appear in black-on-white to highlight the exit.
In most cases, like here (photographed through the rear window), the final direction signs appeared on a gantry just before the deceleration lane began.
Spain isn't afraid to use distinctive direction signs. Aside from the ones in the chart below, and one just off an Autopista exit that was literally a full colour drawing of the junction from above complete with road markings and signs, these were common in tourist areas. I'm not entirely sure what their advantage over regular signing is.
Why have a sign telling you where services are, when you can have something that's blindingly complex and utterly indecipherable in a glance at high speed instead?
Yes, this is a matrix sign that attempts to tell you prices for four types of petrol at the three nearest stations. Quite aside from the fact that I never saw one switched on and working in all the time I was in Spain, it's written in small text and gives little idea as to what it does. I wasn't even driving, and it took two or three of them before I worked out what it was for.
The good thing about this sign is that somehow it managed to be manufactured in the correct typeface.
By far the most annoying thing about Spain's roads was not the constant sense of reorganisation, not the fact that half the network seems to be still under construction, not even the haphazard numbering and colour-coding mentioned above.
Instead it was a method of erecting signs that was beyond careless or inconsistent - it was sheer ineptitude. So much so, in fact, that I made it my mission to photograph each variant on the signs I saw and compile them into a table to demonstrate how little anything matched up. See below!
Click to enlarge
Okay, so some of those are explained away by being the old versions of signs (it seems most Spanish signs have been through at least three overhauls in the last 20 years or so). But others are just odd. The third dead end sign uses no font I have seen before. That last no parking one looks as though they decided to write on the sign as well as the plate when they ran out of room (and the plate's in blue as well). The sixth direction sign is apalling - written in Arial and like nothing else on this earth. And what's going on with the third blue arrow sign? It uses the French design!
In short, Spanish roads themselves are excellent (with a few notable exceptions - smaller town councils like to invest in signs saying 'paviment en mal estat' - 'pavement in poor condition' - rather than resurface). The network is dense and well built and improving rapidly. Unfortunately, the standard of signing just lets the place down terribly. What we've lost to them in road mileage we more than make back in consistency.
Numbering
Vincent added this information about Spanish road numbering:
In general you have one national system which indicates motorways (Autopistas are tolled and Autovias are free) as "A"; National roads as "N"; Secondary roads as "C".
Almost all regions have their own system adopted. In Madrid and Catalonia there are only M and C roads, which refer to the location of the road and not to the classification. Generally, 1 or 2 digit numbers indicate motorway (like) roads and more digits indicate lower class roads, but there are exceptions.
Martin writes with some more details:
Having recently returned from a holiday is Spain during which period I drove fram Madrid to the Costa Calida and back, may I add a few other comments about Spanish roads:
- Other road prefixes that I saw include "MU" for "Murcia" and "CT" for Carteghena".
- All motorways have very distinctive kilometer marker posts which both my wife and I found vrey useful, especically on our trip back to Madrid from the coast.
- Motorway junctions take their number from the nearest kilometer marker post. If there are two offramps that are very close to each other (such as at kilometer 621 on the A7, the exits are marked "Salida 621A" and "Salida 621B".
Colin Mackay adds some additional comments:
If you talk to a Spaniard they rarely use the route number. For instance if you are in Madrid and you are talking about getting to Barcelona you don't talk about the N-II (Nacional Dos, also note the roman numerals) you talk about the Carretera de Barcelona (which is also occasionally signed).
[It's worth pointing out that in some senses, Spanish road numbers do have great significance. Many out of town businesses give their address as the kilometrepost number and route number, eg. N-220 km 41.]
All roads officially lead (Well, the N-I to N-VI) from Kilometro Cero (Kilometer Zero) which is in the Puerto del Sol in Madrid. The actual marker is on the south size of the plaza and is a map of Spain that is curiously upside down.
Thiago Morini writes from Spain:
To understand the strange numbering system in Spain - yes! it HAS a sense - you must understand the changes that Spain has taken in the last 30 years, after Franco died and was buried under a 3ton stone - why they don't did it before? - Spain was a centralized state and it had a centralized numbering system. There were the Autopistas (A), the motorways we know, signed blue, and the Nacionales (N) roads, signed red. There were - and there are - two kinds of N-roads: the radiales, six main roads marked from Madrid and numbered with roman digits (I to VI) and the ordinary national roads, signed with three digits. This three digits, I have heard, actually have a sense, but I never found it. Supposedly, the farthest it begins from Madrid the highest these digits are. The ordinary N-roads don't have to be less important or less long than the radials; the longest road in Spain is N-340 (Cadiz to Barcelona by the coast), who was near 1200 km, and carries a lot more of traffic that some radials (as lots of British tourists can say). These roads were owned and mantained by the state (except some tolled "autopistas" who were mantained by the concessionaries), The rest of roads were mantained by the provinces, and there were two types: the "comarcales" (C), signed green and numbered with three or four digits, who were important inter-regional links but no so important to deserve improvement and state maintenance (kind of B-roads) and then the "locales" (L), marked yellow and also numbered with three or four digits, who was simply the rest of paved roads. Some "locales" were not marked with L's but by the province code, and some very small roads had also a V to mark they were "vecinal" roads as MV-3010 (Madrid, Vecinal 3010).
Sounds bad? It will sound worse.
Beginning in 1979, the regions of Spain begun a devolution process (similar to the Scottish, but in a bigger size) and with this devolution, in a first moment provincial roads were given to the new autonomous communities. These communities begun to name these roads with their autonomous community name. For example: the old C-501 became M-501 in Madrid and CL-501 at Castilla-Leon. The things hardened when they began to number them under their own systems; as the EX-203 (old C-501) in Extremadura. Worst; the central government begun to handle old national roads and some motorways to some autonomous communities. Then the communities begun to change numbering without any notice; Barcelonians only knew that A-19 became C-32 when they saw it, a beautiful morning, in their road signs. Almost worst; the colour coding is also responsability of the autonomous communities. In Madrid, 1st class Madrid roads are signed orange (even motorways), 2nd class are signed green and third class are signed yellow. There is an attempt to uniformize this, but at the moment...
Well, you must say. It can't be worse than this. Can it?
At the same time, Spain lived the greatest road construction fever. The old and decaying national road network was improved to motorway standards. But the new motorways were not like the old ones. First of all, old motorways directly bypassed the villages and small roads. As they were a tool of regional development - or at least it that we said to Brussels - every small road and village must have an exit. Second, they must be non-tolled. To distinguish "new" motorways of "old" ones, the "new" were named "autovias" and signed distinctively (at first you couldn't run in the "autovias" as in the "autopistas": it was 120 kph in the autopistas and 110 in the autovias). These "autovias" were numbered with the number of the old national roads.
But in 2004, without telling anyone, the central government changed the name of all autovias. They now were marked blue, as an "autopista", with an A. Tolled motorways were marked with an oddly "AP" (Autopista de Peaje). This changes made it chaotic for the visitor. OK, you can deduct that the N-VI in your map is now A-6, but how the hell you can find N-401 if now it's A-42? City ring roads and city access motorways are now marked with the code of the city they contour or access. It's confusing, because regional roads are also marked with that codes. For example: M-30 and M-607 are two Madrid motorways, but M-30 is a national motorway and is marked in blue, but M-607 is a regional motorway, then marked in orange.
And to increase confusion, four new tolled motorways were built to help relieving the packed access of Madrid. These are marked R for (Autopistas) "Radiales", as R-2, R-3, R-4 and R-5. All this mess make M-40, the second Madrid orbital motorway, the nightmare of the tourist.
Matthew Hill solves the signposting mystery:
My son, who has lived in rural Spain for 12 years, says that one can make sense of the roadsigns in Spain in one sentence - the signs are made for people who know how to get there!
Colin brings more road numbering news:
A new variation in Murcia: some existing MU-xxx roads are being upgraded to autovias with the designation RM-1, RM-2, etc. For examples MU-602 (Alhama to Cartagena) becomes RM-2.
I don't know about you but this road numbering business is giving me a headache.
With thanks to David Marsden for information on this page.
