Barcelona to Madrid: Flights and High Speed Rail

In just a few short days, on 5 October 2026, Vueling flight number VY1010 will be on its way to Madrid after taking off from Barcelona at 07:25. The roughly 485 kilometres between the two Spanish cities takes 1 hour and 25 minutes in flight time and has enough demand that Vueling decided to restart this service after having given up this route in March 2025. When this restart was announced over the summer, a number of news outlets covered it and commented on the decline of the high-speed rail connection between the two cities and the country’s high-speed service in general. I wanted to do some more digging myself. What are the options? To understand where Vueling fits in all this, I wanted to see the other flights between Barcelona and Madrid. The numbers are quite astounding; on a regular Monday you can find 14 Iberia flights from BCN to MAD starting at 07:00 with the last departure scheduled at 21:10. Add to this two existing Air Europa flights, at 11:50 and 20:30, and Vueling’s new…