High speed rail station in Zaragoza

This big building is a railway station for the Madrid-Barcelona AVE high-speed line. It is equipped with all the necessary infrastructure plus roads and bus parking facilities. Next to the building is a sector set aside for the Railway Museum and a transport-themed leisure park.

The entire building is covered by a single 5,500-ton metal roof. The structure of the Zaragoza-Delicias Station roof is 370 metres long, and it contains great cable-stayed metal arches, with a 150-metre span and a 14-metre rise. These arches are set 43 metres apart. The stay of each arch is held up by four vertical suspension ropes. At the bottom stay of these arches rests the roof structure proper, which sports pyramidal facets.


With this design, the metal arches are visible from outside the station, while inside the play of skylights and suspended wooden ceilings form a very special combination, both aesthetically and in terms of building technique. In fact, this is the largest pillar-free roofed space in Spain. The roof structure's construction design was implemented by the Special Works Service, of FCC Construcción's Technical Services.

Another important aspect of construction was the foundations, where foundation walls were built and anchored with 15-metre-long post-tensioned cables.