Intensive spanish in Spain

Travel in Spain with the AVE during your intensive Spanish program

If you are spending several months studying intensive Spanish in Spain, then you will doubtlessly want to take advantage of one of your weekends for a short break to visit more of the country. These short breaks allow you to practices in new surrounding and with different people the grammar, vocabulary and syntax you have acquired during your intensive Spanish language course.

For those students on language programs in Barcelona, a weekend visit to Madrid would be one of the first suggestions to come to mind, and vice versa: anyone on intensive Spanish courses for adults in Madrid should consider a visit to Barcelona. Spain’s two largest cities have always been rivals on the economic, cultural and sporting fronts. There is a good deal of interchange between the two cities, and as a result they are particularly well connected by road, rail and air. The distance between their respective downtown areas is just over six hundred kilometres if you choose to travel by car, with a journey time of about seven hours. If you choose to use one of the many bus services, then the journey time is about eight hours.

Business people on Spanish courses for professionals, and those people with less time in general, should consider the “puente aereo” or air shuttle service between Barcelona and Madrid. On some days there are nearly one hundred flights between the two cities, starting as early as half past six, and going on to well past midnight. There are several companies operating flights, so students studying intensive Spanish in Spain would be well advised to shop around to find the best fares and conditions for the day on which they want to travel.

Up until recently rail travel between Madrid and Barcelona, though faster than the road option, was nothing to write home about. Before the start of the high speed service, the fastest train took four and a half hours to link the Barcelona Sants station with its Madrid Puerta de Atocha counterpart. The high speed train link, inaugurated in February 2008 has cut this journey time down to just two and a half hours. For students studying intensive Spanish in Spain in downtown Barcelona or Madrid, this is the quickest way of getting to the centre of the other city. For the busy student participating on one of the many intensive Spanish courses for business people, there is now no need to get a bus, taxi or train to the airport to check in well ahead of time. Nor is there the need to wait for baggage collection at destination, nor queue up for a further bus, taxi or train ride into town.



Intensive spanish in Spain

The Spanish government has embarked on an ambitious project for the construction of new rail lines in Spain. The objective is to link all provincial capital cities to Madrid in less than four hours, and to Barcelona in less than six and a half hours. The target is for more than seven thousand kilometres of high speed railway operating at a speed of three hundred and fifty kilometres per hour. Those students studying intensive Spanish in Spain in Barcelona can already take advantage of high speed links to Tarragona, Lleida and Zaragoza as well as Madrid. Participants of Spanish courses for business people in Madrid have these travel options as well as those offered by Spain’s first high speed link to Cordoba and Seville. The extension of this line to Malaga was opened in December 2007, putting the centre of this city at just two and a half hours travel time from downtown Madrid.



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