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Anyone who has spent time behind the wheel in Spain will already know that the roads can be a bit of an adventure, but the latest figures confirm it's even worse than most people realised.

 

More than half of Spain's entire road network is now in need of serious attention and the Spanish Road Association (AEC) says conditions are the worst they've recorded since the late 1980s and early 1990s.

 

The AEC has been keeping tabs on the state of Spain's roads for 40 years, and its most recent audit makes for uncomfortable reading. Of the country's 101,700 kilometres of road, a staggering 54,373km need some form of intervention. Around 34,000km of that requires urgent reconstruction right now due to what the report describes as "very serious" deterioration, covering everything from potholes and deep cracking to surface peeling and structural damage.

 

A further 20,400km needs work within the next four years. The bill for sorting all of this out has been estimated at €13.49 billion, and that figure was calculated before the recent wave of storms that swept across the country and caused yet more damage.

 

To put the scale of the decline into context, back in 2022 there were around 13,000 kilometres of road classed as very severely deteriorated. By 2025 that number had more than tripled to 34,000 kilometres. Three years, three times worse.

 

When you break it down by region, Aragon comes out bottom of the pile and is the only area the audit classifies as being at a "critical level," with 68% of its roads showing serious or very serious damage. Galicia and Castilla-La Mancha are next, both at 59%, followed by Murcia and Asturias at 58%, La Rioja and Castilla y León at 57%, and Catalonia at 52%.

 

Eight regions in total, then, where more than half of all roads are in a bad way.

 

At the other end of the scale, only three regions can claim their roads are in "acceptable" condition, meaning less than 40% of their network is deteriorating. Those are Extremadura at 40%, Madrid at 38% and the Valencian Community, which comes out best of all at 32%.

 

Looks like drivers can expect plenty of chipped alloys and those bone-shaking secondary roads wherever they travel.

 

 

Image: Freepik