Road types

From trunk roads, main roads, and motorways, through to the tarmac ribbons in the countryside, the different sorts and standards of roads in Spain are owned and looked after by different levels of government.

Most of the roads operated by the national government are the ones that cross provincial and regional boundaries. This includes both motorways and conventional roads. The motorways are divided into two types: autovías and autopistas. There are technical differences between the two types of road (such as the style of junctions, width of carriageways, design speed, and the like), for most Spaniards, autovía is the all-purpose word for motorways, and they reserve autopista for toll motorways. For Brits the distinction might be that autopistas are motorways and autovias are major dual carriageways. Both types have a median separating the carriageways and at least two carriageways in either direction and the generic speed limit of 120 km/h.

The signs, direction signs, kilometre posts, etc., for these autovías and autopistas have a blue background and white lettering. Their road numbers start with an A or AP if it's a toll road. Roads which were toll roads but are now toll-free tend to keep the AP designation. This blog explains more about their numbering.

The toll motorways were usually built as a partnership between public and private funds. The normal deal is that the constructor gets to maintain the road and charge a toll during the period of a temporary contract, typically 25 years. When the contract ends, the road becomes toll-free, and the title of the road falls to the government. Lots of toll roads have had to be bailed out of financial difficulties. During the current election campaign there have been several claims and counter claims that a general toll will be introduced on Spanish motorways from the start of January 2024. There's little doubt that tolls are coming, because Brussels is looking to recover some of the money invested, but the chance of it happening so soon are pretty slim.

The state's conventional roads, two-lane roads, one in each direction, often with a third uphill crawler lane on steeper sections, are traditionally called national roads. The generic maximum speed allowed on national roads is 90 km/h. In the Basque Country and Navarre, these roads are owned by the regional government. The signs, direction signs, kilometre posts, etc., for these roads have a red background with white lettering. The road number will begin with the letter N. The same blog as mentioned above explains the road numbering system.

Outside the Basque Country and Navarre, the regional governments manage the roads that are within their territory. There are three classes or levels.

The first level comprises the most important roads in each autonomous community. They tend to be the busy, longer-distance roads within a region, and they can be either conventional or motorway-style. The signs, direction signs, kilometre posts, etc., for these roads have an orange background and black lettering. The road number will usually start with an identifier for the autonomous community. CV for the Comunitat Valenciana, RM for the Region of Murcia, etc. When one of these first-level roads is a motorway, the signs are sometimes blue, and some regions use a version that starts with A before the regional identifier (e.g., AG-59 in Galicia), but most seem to stick to the orange background and the regional initials.

The second level comprises "intercomarcal" roads, and they tend to connect towns or act as feeder roads to either the first-level roads or the national roads and motorways. The signs, direction signs, kilometre posts, etc., for these roads have a green background with white lettering. The letter (usually) corresponds to the province, and the numbers to the road.

The third level comprises local roads, which are usually short and link nearby localities or go to places of interest. The signs, direction signs, kilometre posts, etc., for these roads have a yellow background and black lettering that identifies the province or locality to which they belong and the number of the road.

Finally, there are the roads maintained by the local municipalities, which are very local roads and country roads within municipal borders. Usually, they don't have any sort of identifier except the signs which give the destination. There are, of course, exceptions. Some municipalities own and manage bigger roads, including motorway-standard roads, which usually have a letter for the municipality followed by a road number, such as the M30 in Madrid or the CT32 in Cartagena, for instance.

To cap off the signs you might see and to make sure that Big Chief I-Spy gives you due recognition, I should mention the European road network. These are the through routes across the continent. The signs, direction signs, kilometre posts, etc., for these roads add a green panel with white lettering to the existing road name, prefaced by the letter E.

And finally, just for completeness, I wanted to mention the roads which don't fit into this classification, particularly the roads run by the hydrographic confederations. If you drive across the countryside, you will come across these from time to time - usually, they are strange gated roads with dire warning signs set among acres of plastic sheeting or extensive crops. Ports and airports also maintain their own roads.

Around and around

Nowadays instead of working for a crust I live off pensions. One of the few things I miss about that last part of my working career, the bit where I attempted to teach English to Spanish students, is that they told me about things Spanish. One time a student told me that she was an architect. When I asked what she was working on and the answer was a roundabout. It was a bit of an eye opener. It had never crossed my mind that roundabouts were architect designed.

Roundabouts in Spain are a bit of a growth industry. New ones pop up all the time. Spanish roundabouts have, to British schooled drivers, strange rules. Basically the outside lane, the one that involves going the greatest distance, always has precedence. So, whereas in the UK you use a different entry lane for right as against left turns there is absolutely no reason to do so in Spain. This isn't particularly important where there is no traffic but it certainly makes big and busy roundabouts in cities quite interesting. As well as the priorities being different the only necessary turn signal is one to show that you are leaving the roundabout. That British thing of signalling to show you're staying in the roundabout and then changing turn signals to show you're leaving is not the Spanish way. And, as most Spanish drivers seem to have forgotten where they put the turn signal controls that leads to even extra fun in roundabouts. 

When we got here to Pinoso, if my memory serves me well, there were six roundabouts within the Pinoso boundary. We now have nine. The three extra ones have all been built since 2018. Prettifying the roundabouts seems to be quite important. One of the Pinoso ones has a huge thing built out of blocks of local marble - I've heard it called The Coliseum and Stonehenge. Outside Abanilla they have one with artificial grass and with a replica of the big stone Archbishop's Cross that they have atop their local mountain. The one by the Dos Mares Shopping centre in San Javier has a jet trainer. At la Romana there are twin marble towers. There are others with really old olive trees, with fishing boats, with wine barrels and sculptures. I often wonder about the one out at Salado Alto which is sown with lots of stones that look like the standing stones at Carnac. I'm sure some bewildered 29th Century archaeologist will fall back on the old chestnut of religious significance to explain them. Of course the maintenance of the roundabouts can be a bit hit and miss. Weeds adorn more than their fair share. 

Two of the older roundabouts in Pinoso have been getting a bit of a facelift recently. The one at the entrance to Pinoso, from Monóvar on the CV83, now boasts and awful lot of concrete. The remodelling though has left the three pine trees, similar to the ones which feature on the town's coat of arms, in place. The masonry sign embellished with the town coat of arms is still there to show why the roundabout is as it is. 

The other roundabout, the one where the CV836 comes in from Yecla or, if you prefer, the one where the CV83, as an extension of the RM427, comes in from Jumilla, has also been getting a facelift. There they have coloured and contoured the concrete. I'm sure you know, but, just in case you don't, the roads with the CV prefix belong to the Comunitat Valenciana whilst the ones that begin RM are in the Región de Murcia. In the same vein if it were a national road it would have an N designation, or maybe an A for Autovía or motorway.

I had wondered about all that concrete. Before the titivation the roundabouts were mainly soil and gravel. It's not exactly that we're short of greenery round here but it did seem slightly perverse to lay tons and tons of concrete in what are supposed to be environmentally aware times. In that way that things have of co-inciding, of happenstance, I was listening to an interview on the radio and they got to talking about roundabouts. The group being interviewed were an action group that is trying to replant trees and bushes all over Spain, their name is Arriba las ramas or something like Up with branches! Their spokesperson said that a trend in several cities was to plant roundabouts with native species. Trees, bushes and plants that can look after themselves without the need for costly maintenance. The provision of a habitat for local beasts was a bit of a side benefit. Obviously that's not a trend around here.

I'd mentioned the concrete to Maggie as we drove past. I wondered about the rain. When it rains around here it often rains in shedloads. With the gravel and soil on the roundabouts the water had somewhere to escape to. I can envisage that same rain cascading off the concrete into the roadway. Mind you, if they have architects for roundabouts I suppose they know about drains too!

The photos are of three of our Pinoso roundabouts.

The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away

I always called it Road Tax and I suppose that's what it really was, in the beginning. You had a car and you paid tax that was then used to build and repair roads. It's not a principle that's applied to schools or social services but I can see the sense.  Not everybody needs roads so the people with vehicles pay. But UK road tax was abolished in 1937, long before even I was born, and replaced by Vehicle Excise Duty. This is, and was, a tax on cars, not roads, and it goes straight into the general fund.

Here in Spain I pay a vehicle tax too. It's charged by the local town hall and collected on their behalf by a tax management agency, called SUMA. SUMA is a local organisation created by most of the Alicante town halls, working collectively, to collect local taxes. The tax on the Arona for this year is a bit short of 18€. Obviously comparing a local tax with a central government tax is unreasonable but it looks as though the Vehicle Excise Duty in the UK for the same car would be £155. 

The roads have to be paid for somehow and we have a lot of toll motorways in Spain. The motorway that runs up the Mediterranean coast was a toll road for years but most of that became free at the beginning of 2020. Not all the local motorways are free though and we still have a couple of paying motorways close to us. There's one that goes around Alicante and another that branches off the Mediterranean motorway heading for Torrevieja and Cartagena. In the olden days, when we weren't confined to our home region and we could stay out after 10pm, the SatNav often warned us of tolls. I think we were paying 12 centimos for every kilometre on the Mediterranean motorway just before the toll was removed so that popping up to see pals in Altea, which only took a bit over an hour, cost around 18€ for the round trip. 

I don't like tolls much. It's not that they are inherently bad but they always strike me as expensive. On October 7th 2004 my diary entry says that my 1977 MGB GT covered the 1349 miles from Huntingdon to Santa Pola using about 200€ worth of petrol and with 120€ in tolls. MGBs are old and thirsty cars. Mine had the steering wheel on the wrong side for paying tolls on the European mainland. I got quite a lot of exercise, running around the car. The cat in the passenger seat was no help at all!

Anyway. You may have noticed that we've been having a bit of a problem with a virus. Like nearly everyone else the EU decided to print money to deal with this. They told Spain they could have 140 billion to fund a recovery plan. There were lots of conditions to getting the money, most of which I don't remember, or never knew, but the news reports always mention principals like developing modern infrastructure and being greener. Spain had to write a plan to say how it intended to spend the billions but also how it intended to help itself. Apparently the plan is only about 800 pages longer than Tolstoy's War and Peace and on, at least, one of those pages is the plan to introduce or reintroduce tolls on all Spanish motorways.

I can't imagine that the new tolls, due for 2024, will be paid at toll booths by actually handing over coins or banknotes or even virtual money but, however they track my use and make me pay I'm sure I won't like it.