Barca d'Alva railway station

Barca d'Alva railway station was the terminal station of the Douro Line, until its closure in 1988. The station used to serve the village of Barca d'Alva and acted as a border station between Portugal and Spain, via the Barca d'Alva–La Fuente de San Esteban railway. It is located in the municipality of Figueira de Castelo Rodrigo, in Portugal.

The first plans to build a cross-border railway linking the north of the country and Spain were proposed in the mid-19th century, as part of a larger project to construct a commercial port in Leixões. This port would serve the city of Porto and the entire north-western region of the Iberian Peninsula, directly competing with the Port of Vigo. Consequently, a railway line to Galicia was proposed, but later put on hold due to financial difficulties and a shift in priorities towards the Linha do Leste railway line between Lisbon and Badajoz. A revised plan was then projected to connect Porto to Salamanca in Spain, in an attempt to place that city in Porto's area of influence. In 1864, a Luso-Spanish technical commission approved five international railway links between Portugal and Spain, including one between Barca d'Alva and the Spanish towns of La Fregeneda, Vitigudino and Ledesma. Subsequently, it was decided to build another international line from Salamanca to Vilar Formoso, where it would join the Beira Alta line. Originally, both lines were to share the section from Salamanca to Ciudad Rodrigo, but a Spanish Royal Order on 18 August 1880, requested by the Portuguese government, shifted the divergence point to Boadilla.On 20 May 1881, a Royal Order approved the construction of the section from Vilar Formoso to Salamanca, but left the choice of the junction point open. This provoked protests from Lisbon, leading to a new Royal Order on 3 November 1881 that annulled the previous decision and called for a tender covering both lines. Although the Portuguese state had set a three-year deadline for completion of the works, the Société Financière de Paris, the operator for the Beira Alta line, claimed that construction would require at least five years. The Association of Civil Engineers shared this view a

TrainStation data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).