Highways in Spain

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The Spanish motorway (highway) network is the third largest in the world, by length. as of 2019, there are of High Capacity Roads (lang es) in the country. There are two main types of such roads, autopistas and autovías, which differed in the strictness of the standards they are held to.

It is considered that the construction of motorways has helped to increase safety in Spanish roads, while generating a traffic increase. Fatalities on motorways have decreased from 776 in 2006 to 277 in 2015. Spain is one of the countries of the EU with most of the road fatalities occurring on motorways rather than on other roads: 16% in 2015. But the same year, taking into account the fact that Spain has a larger network of road than motorways, Spain is one of the countries with the lowest motorway fatality rates per 1.000 km of motorways, after Finland, Denmark, Croatia, and Hungary: 18.1 fatalities per 1000 kilometers of motorways. Blue for motorways owned by the national government or private companies (tolled). Some regional governments also use blue. Red for all other roads owned by the national government. Orange for first tier roads owned by regional governments. Green for second tier roads owned by regional governments. Yellow for third tier roads owned by regional governments, and for roads owned by provincial governments.

The formation of the several Autonomous Communities in the early 1980s led to the transfer of many roads to the new regional authorities. Since then, several of those roads have been upgraded to motorway level in order to ensure the internal vertebration of the region, or to provide alternative high capacity routes to those managed by the national government when those were inadequate or saturated. All of the old comarcal roads (C nnn) comprising the secondary network were transferred to the Autonomous Communities, splitting them up as necessary; while the national roads (N nnn) that formed the primary network were mostly kept by the State. The level of control each community has over its road network varies: the Basque Country and Navarre have received the titularity of nearly all roads in their territories, while in other communities the regional network coexists with and complements the national one. Whatever the extension of the road network under its control, all communities have full powers over naming and identification of their roads, provided no name conflicts with a national road or a regional road of a neighbouring community.

The only community without a high capacity network of its own, Cantabria is severely held back in such a development by a highly mountainous terrain that multiplies the cost of building any kind of expressway. Thus, its population is served by the national highway network supplemented by regional conventional roads.