Traveling through France with my wife and two teenage sons, heading towards Spain. Crossing the Pyrenees! We were traveling by public transport and had taken the bus in Pau that would take us over the mountains to Spain. The beauty of traveling without a detailed plan is that you let yourself be surprised, because what is the point of visiting a place you already know from travel brochures? That "we'll see" mentality paid off handsomely back then.
Once over the highest mountain pass, filled with admiration for the Tour de France heroes who had conquered these barren heights standing on their pedals, we descended again to more vegetated areas. And there, a fairytale-like phenomenon unfolded before our eyes: there, in the middle of nowhere, lay a beautiful, grand palace! An enormous Baroque main building with two huge wings on either side!
We decided to get off there. The adjacent insignificant little village was called Canfranc-Estación. As it turned out, the palace was actually a huge, abandoned train station… So we set out to explore. The enormous station hall was deserted, with a few old newspapers blowing around. A row of deserted ticket counters. Large halls that had been set up for luggage inspection by customs officers… now eerily deserted, but it felt as if there was a hive of activity, with ghostly apparitions of wealthy international travelers and stern officials in uniforms and caps.
When we stepped onto the platform, an enormous railway yard stretched out before us, with switches and rusted hoists to transfer the wagons from French-gauge undercarriages to the non-standard Spanish gauge. All those rusted tracks were overgrown with weeds, bushes, and fruit-bearing strawberry plants—delicious sweet strawberries! If you tried to flip a rusty switch—some still managed it—the lizards scattered in all directions; for some, it had cost them a piece of their tail. And then those delightfully creepy, long, abandoned tunnels underneath—you really have to experience that.
It turned out that the station had once been an important link in the connection between Spain and France, a grand project from the pre-war Franco era intended to connect Madrid with Paris. However, the tunnel under the Pyrenees, the Somport Tunnel, had been damaged by a collapse and never repaired.
The station hotel was also out of service, so we had to seek refuge in a small, youth hostel-style hotel in the village. A few days later, we took the only train still stopping at the station, the local train to Jaca, departing twice a day.
This experience was so beautiful! I'm including a picture from the internet so you can get a bit of an impression.