Letter from Spain #69
Spain is in mourning.
Just a short post this week.
The Spanish government has declared the country is in official mourning for three days - from midnight tonight until midnight on Thursday.
At the time of writing this, it has been confirmed that at least 39 people lost their lives after two high-speed trains collided in Andalusia on Sunday evening - a death toll that is likely to rise.
Authorities are currently focused on attending hundreds of distraught family members, asking many of them to provide DNA samples to help identify victims. There is also a fear that more bodies will be discovered once the wreckage of the trains is finally removed.
Various Spaniards who had loved ones on the trains have posted messages on social media saying they are unaccounted for and pleading for any information.
43 people remain in hospital - 39 adults and four children. One of the children and 12 adults are in intensive care. Since yesterday, 79 people have already been discharged.
The high-speed trains collided near Adamuz in the province of Córdoba at 19.45h local time on Sunday, about an hour after one of them - an Iryo train, partly owned by Italy’s state-owned railway company - departed Málaga for Madrid with 294 people on board in eight carriages.
The other train, an Alvia - run by RENFE, Spain’s national railway operator - had left Atocha station in Madrid at 18.05h and was heading to Huelva in Andalusia. It was carrying 184 passengers in four carriages.
At 19.45h, carriages 6, 7 and 8 of the Iryo train came off the tracks close to a set of points near Adamuz. Within 20 seconds, the oncoming Alvia train collided with the derailed carriages. The Alvia train’s front carriages left the track, falling four metres down an embankment.
Investigations are currently underway about the cause of the tragedy - and I am not going to speculate on anything here on Substack.
Human error has already been ‘practically ruled out’ by the president of RENFE. He told Spanish public radio RNE that both trains were under the speed limit of 250 kph; one was going 205 kph, the other 210 kph. He also said: ‘If a train driver makes an incorrect decision, the system itself corrects it. Let’s not speculate; let’s wait for the investigation.’
Spain’s worst train accident this century occurred in 2013, when 80 people died after a train derailed in Galicia. An investigation concluded the train was travelling at 179 kph on a stretch with an 80 kph speed limit when it left the tracks. That stretch of track was also not for high-speed trains.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has pledged to ‘get to the truth’ about the cause of Sunday’s accident in Andalusia. ‘We are going to find the answer and determine the origin of the cause of this tragedy with transparency and clarity,’ he said in a statement to the media in Adamuz.
Meanwhile, he said: ‘Society demands two things from institutions: unity in grief and unity in response.’
Spain has spent decades investing heavily in high-speed trains and currently has the largest rail network in Europe for trains moving over 250 kph, with more than 3,900 kilometres of track.
The network is a popular, competitively priced and safe mode of transport. RENFE said more than 25 million passengers took one of its high-speed trains in 2024.
Iryo became the first private competitor in high-speed to RENFE in Spain in 2022.
I have travelled on Iryo trains a lot. I always use them for travelling from Barcelona to Madrid and back. It has always been a great train - clean, efficient, reliable, spacious - a great service and not expensive. Over the weekend, I even booked a return Iryo ticket to travel to Madrid on 16 April until 20 April for a book event. I will not stop using them.
Watching, reporting and covering the news of this tragedy during all of today, my heart goes out to all those affected - and for the many families, relatives and friends still searching for news of their loved ones.
Next week, I will start sharing details and images from my research for The Madrid Connection - much as I did (below) for The Barcelona Connection.
A bit about me: on and off, I have worked in the media in Spain for some 30 years (click here for more info). Currently, in addition to writing my books set in Spain and developing them for the screen (see below), I also chat briefly on Wednesday mornings to Giles Brown on Talk Radio Europe about the latest news from Spain. If you’re interested, here’s the chat we had last week - on Weds 14 Jan. We talk about Julio Iglesias, blackface, new rental restrictions and Costa del Sol burglars …
Books, Reviews, Research, News & Events
To anyone in and around Barcelona, come along if you can to this ‘Chit-chat with Author’ event at the Come In English Bookshop on Tuesday 27 January at 6.30pm. You don’t need to have bought your copy of ‘The Madrid Connection’ from the shop - in fact you don’t need to have bought it from anywhere! We’re simply going to have fun chatting about it, and it would be great to see you there. The shop says it would be best to register via the QR code or via this link.
Another date for the diary: on FRIDAY 17 APRIL I am going to be presenting The Madrid Connection in the Secret Kingdoms Bookshop in Madrid. More details to follow in due course.
The Madrid Connection
Published on 26 November 2025, The Madrid Connection is a standalone crime-thriller, but also a sequel to The Barcelona Connection (see below).
Here’s the back cover blurb from The Madrid Connection:
Of all the paintings in all the galleries in all of Madrid.
They chose a Caravaggio.
And they chose last night.
On the night Madrid hosts the Champions League Final, disaster erupts at the Prado Museum: a guard is murdered and a Caravaggio is stolen.
British art detective Benjamin Blake, hoping for a quiet few days in the city on a low-key assignment, instead finds himself dragged into the chaos he swore to avoid.
Suddenly he’s the investigation’s uninvited headache – and possibly its key.
Rival mafias begin circling. The Asians want him gone. The Italians want him alive – at least for now.
As the cultural bureaucrats drag him into the case to deflect from their own failings, Madrid’s homicide chief – choking on his own lies – wants him nowhere near the case, let alone the truth.
Across the city, journalist Elena Carmona is in Madrid on a separate assignment, digging into the poison of racism in football – an evil that opens into a far wider conspiracy.
Trafficking, exploitation and revenge run beneath the pitch and deep into the criminal underworld, drawing her straight towards the same mafias now circling the stolen Caravaggio.
As her investigation crashes straight into Benjamin’s, they find themselves at the centre of something far darker than either imagined.
Art, money, football, murder, mafia – Madrid was never going to keep them apart.
The Madrid Connection is a fast, gripping and darkly funny page-turner - the perfect sequel to The Barcelona Connection.
As with The Barcelona Connection below, I’ll be posting more details about the research behind The Madrid Connection over the coming weeks - together with many photos taken in Madrid of the locations in the book.
The Barcelona Connection - Research & development for the screen
‘The Barcelona Connection’ is in development for the screen, and I hope I will be able to post further news about this here in due course.
Research: In my weekly ‘Letter from Spain’ from #7 right up to #42, I included notes about all the research I carried out for The Barcelona Connection. Many of the posts include photos and descriptions of locations that appear in the book, from Nîmes, Figueres, Cadaqués, La Bisbal d’Empordà and, of course, many areas of Barcelona. There are also posts about Salvador Dalí’s Hallucinogenic Toreador and ‘The Face’, the Dalí Museum in Figueres, the Picasso Museum and MNAC in Barcelona, even Girona Airport and nearby motorway service station - as well as the G20 Spouse Party, museum visits and ‘art attacks’. I hope the notes about the research are of interest … and I hope you might buy, read and take The Barcelona Connection with you to some of the locations that appear in the book! If you do, please send me a photo and I’ll post it here …
The Barcelona Connection - Book & Reviews
A murder. A kidnapping. A lost Salvador Dalí painting. Just 36 hours to resolve all three. Every crime scene is a work of art …
Benjamin Blake is no ordinary detective. Specialising in the criminal underworld of stolen and forged art, things don’t always go the right way for Benjamin. But when they don’t, he has a stubborn determination to put them right.
Within hours of being sent to Barcelona to authenticate a possible Salvador Dalí painting, Benjamin is left stranded without his cell phone at a service station alongside a bloody corpse in the early hours of the morning, after being savagely attacked with his hire car stolen, together with the painting.
Helped and hindered by the fiery Elena Carmona, pursued by a psychopathic hitman, Benjamin becomes the prime suspect in a politically motivated kidnap and murder. All this on the eve of Barcelona hosting a G20 summit and UN climate change conference, with the police in hot pursuit fearing a wider terrorist threat.
From Nîmes in the South of France, across the border to the sweltering humidity of Girona, Barcelona, Figueres and Cadaqués, The Barcelona Connection is a fast-paced, gripping page-turner sprinkled with black comedy, blending the real with the surreal, art crime and mistaken identity … and where the clues at the crime scene might just be the mirror image of a long-lost work of art …
If you can’t locate a copy of The Barcelona Connection in your local store, it can be ordered from any bookshop simply by giving the ISBNnumber: 978-1-7393326-1-7.
It is also available in print or as an eBook via Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or you can also click here to choose where else to order your copy from.
Click here for the latest reviews on Amazon and on Goodreads.
A review by Michael Eaude of The Barcelona Connection was published in the October 2023 edition of Catalonia Today.
‘Short, fast-moving scenes and the deft joining of two completely different plots … the novel is not just breathlessly rapid and action-packed, but overflows with humour and satire.’
‘The excellent plotting, the local knowledge, the surreal humour, the political satire and the speed of events … it’s an admirable and very readable crime novel.’
A review by Dominic Begg of The Barcelona Connection was published in La Revista, a publication of the British-Spanish Society.
‘The Barcelona Connection is a fast-moving page-turner with a helter-skelter plot.’
‘The background to this thriller is realistic and familiar to those who know Barcelona well. It’s a world of cynical, ambitious politicians; civil servants promoted via enchufe; friction between Spanish and Catalan investigators; disruptive anti-capitalist activists; bumbling US dignitaries and security guards; the continuing influence of old supporters of Franco; the soulless 21st century, exemplified by apartment hotels seemingly without human staff-members …’
Here’s a link to a review of the book by Eve Schnitzer published by the Spain in English online newspaper.
‘Tim Parfitt very cleverly weaves together two parallel though quite different stories, set against the background of a contemporary Barcelona that is even busier than usual with major international meetings.’
‘Two plot lines interweave, with some highly ironic as well as suspenseful results … this book has a lot to offer the reader, from pure entertainment to solid information and, possibly, a fuller understanding of the complexities of Spain and Catalonia in particular.’
Here’s the link to an article I was asked to write for The Art Newspaper about my research on Salvador Dalí.
A Load of Bull - An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid - Book & Reviews
Eighteen years since it was originally published, ‘A Load of Bull - An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid’ has been re-issued with a new introduction, new cover and five extra chapters that were cut from the original book.
It is available in print and as an eBook worldwide, in both formats. You can also order the new paperback or digital edition via Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or the digital version on Apple, Kobo, Smashwords, or on many other platforms by clicking here.
If you’ve never read the book, I hope you will now acquire a copy and laugh out loud. If you did read and enjoy the original edition, I think you’ll love this new edition with additional chapters! More details about the book and links to many reviews are below.
As with previous posts showing images and locations that form part of the research I carried out for The Barcelona Connection novel (above), I am also planning to publish an archive of photos here of Madrid that relate to many chapters in ‘A Load of Bull’ - although it will take time! In Letter from Spain #52, I cover Chapter 1 - the Centro Colón aparthotel (entrance) Watch this space for further images …
A LOAD OF BULL - An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid
The hilarious true story of an Englishman sent to Madrid to help launch Spanish Vogue …
In the late eighties Tim Parfitt blagged his way into a job at Condé Nast in London and from there into a six week stint in Madrid to help launch Spanish Vogue. Six weeks turned into nine years, and helping out turned into running the company. Along the way, Tim Parfitt discovered the real ‘real’ Spain. He never saw a Costa and he certainly never bought an olive grove. Instead, he discovered a booming city in hedonistic reaction to years of fascism, where sleep was something you only did at work and where five hour lunches invariably involved a course of bull’s testicles.
Tim Parfitt’s rise from unwanted guest to paparazzi-pursued mover in Spain’s glamorous social scene is a hilarious comedy of errors. Frothing with a language designed to make foreigners dribble, hospitalised by tapa-induced flatulence and constantly frustrated by the unapproachable beauty of the women parading through the Vogue offices, he nevertheless falls in love with a city, a country and its people - despite the fact he hasn’t a clue what they’re on about.
You can click here for all the reviews of A Load of Bull on Amazon, as well as on Goodreads.
Links to newspaper and magazine reviews:
‘A hugely entertaining memoir ... frequently laugh-out-loud funny.’ (The Daily Express)
‘Parfitt is no ordinary Englishman … his light touch and neat line in self-deprecating humour perfectly suits this entertaining urban spin on the old tale of Brits having fun under the Spanish sun.’ (The Sunday Times)
‘A love letter to Madrid ... brilliantly captures a truly eccentric and hedonistic place.’ (The Daily Mirror)
‘Often hilarious ... a side-splittingly funny travel memoir.’ (BBC Online)
‘Vivid yet affectionate … fascinating, escapist stuff.’ (OK! Magazine)
‘Magnificent ... brilliant and moving, hilarious and truthful.’ (La Vanguardia)
‘Don’t miss it … Madrid through the eyes of an Englishman.’ (Vogue España)
Spanish edition
A Load of Bull was also published in Spanish under the title, Mucho Toro - las tribulaciones de un inglés en la movida. Click here or on image below for the current eBook version.
Contact Details
You can email me at: tim.parfitt@hotmail.co.uk
Yes I heard about this. So sad and saw they are seeking blood donors.