Home Mobility and traffic Madrid Barajas Airport, from Madrid to the skies of the world

Madrid Barajas Airport, from Madrid to the skies of the world

Barajas Airport

Adolfo Suárez Madrid Barajas Airport

Thus, with this complex name, it is what is the name of Madrid Airport. Popularly known as Madrid-Barajas Airport, it is the main airport facility in the capital of Spain. This blog, with an essential component in leisure and tourism, cannot miss a complete description of this emblematic airport.

Madrid-Barajas Airport is the most important airport in Spain and ranks fourth in Europe and twelfth in the world, according to 2011 data. It is located at a distance of twelve kilometres from the centre of Madrid and is the most important base for the air connections of the airlines Iberia and Air Europa, which account for 60% of the total airport traffic. Madrid-Barajas is also a key hub for air connections between Latin America and Europe.

Iberia aircraft at Madrid Barajas Airport

Infrastructures of Adolfo Suárez Madrid Barajas Airport, Terminals T1, T2, T3 and T4

Barajas airport has three buildings that are passenger terminals, a satellite building and two docks, within the different terminals we can also find different parking options for different airport users, in the following address you can find all the information about the airport. parking in barajas. It also has a terminal dedicated exclusively to cargo. The division of the area uses the nomenclature T1, T2, T3, T4 and T4-S, although this does not coincide with the actual architectural division of the airport.

-National Terminal. It is the oldest infrastructure currently in service at the airport. It was reconfigured with interconnections to increase by four new gates. It now has 22 gates (gates C43 to C50 and D53 to D66).
-International Terminal. It is divided between T1 and T2 and has 16 gates (gates B20 to B33 and C34 to C43).
-North Dock. T3 is integrated into the Dársena Norte building, although it is only a separate check-in area, because the boarding and baggage reclaim areas are integrated into T2. The Dársena Norte was originally planned as an extension of the Domestic Terminal, which could incorporate eleven additional check-in desks, five baggage reclaim belts and twenty boarding gates.
-South Basin. This is a building attached to the International Terminal. It has ten boarding gates, gates A1 to A14, five of which have fingers. It is included in its entirety in T1.
-Terminal T4. It has six floors, three above ground, three below. On the first floor there are 22 baggage reclaim belts divided into two halls, ten and eleven. The first is for international flights, the second for domestic flights. It has two double belts, two baggage reclaim belts for special baggage. The first has 76 boarding gates.
-Satellite. It is officially known as T4-S. It has three floors above ground level. The first floor is dedicated to Schengen flights (19 boarding gates), the second floor is for international flights (48 boarding gates), the third floor is for international arrivals and has security-cleared police filters.

The airport is currently managed by AENA, The Spanish airport operator, a publicly owned company that manages the Spanish airports.

Transport connections with Madrid

The 200 and 2004 bus lines of the EMT company of Madrid The bus line 101 links the Avenida de América interchange with the Canillejas area and terminals T1, T2, T3 and T4. Bus line 101 connects the airport with the centre of the town of Barajas and also with the Canillejas interchange.

Other lines run by the Madrid Regional Transport Consortium link the airport terminals with different municipalities in the Community of Madrid: Alcobendas, Coslada, San Fernando de Henares and Torrejón de Ardoz.

Two seasons of the Madrid metro The T1, T2, T3 and T4 terminals are linked, offering a whole repertoire of links to reach the urban geography of the city of Madrid.

History

The original airport was built in 1927 and opened to Spanish air traffic in 1931. The first commercial operations began in 1933. The primitive Barajas terminal of those years had a handling capacity of 30,000 passengers/year. The first scheduled flight was to Barcelona and different European airlines began to use it as a transit point between destinations on the continent and in Africa.

The airfield was originally an unpaved, clear, circular field on which aircraft could land depending on the wind direction. It was not until the 1940s that the pavement was paved. In 1944 the runway was 1,400 metres long and another 45 metres wide. However, by the end of that decade, Madrid Barajas already had three runways from which air connections were made with different Spanish aerodromes, the Philippines and Latin America.

In the 1950s, Madrid-Barajas handled half a million passengers. The runways were extended in those years to five, the T2 terminal was built in 1954 and flights to New York began.

The 1957 airport master plan was aimed at consolidating Barajas as an international air navigation facility. In the 1960s, large aircraft landed at Barajas and flights increased, especially as Spain became a major tourist destination. Boeing 747s landed at Madrid-Barajas in the 1970s and, with four million passengers a year, the Spanish state began work on T1. In 1976 Madrid and Barcelona were linked by the Airlift.

In 1982, the World Cup in Spain forced the airport facilities to be refurbished and extended. In the 1990s, it was extended again: cargo terminal (1994), North Basin (1997), new control tower (1998), new runway 18R-36L (1998) and the South Basin (1999).

In 2000, the construction of the large passenger terminal T4 and its satellite terminal T4s began, although they were only inaugurated in 2006. In 2007, Madrid-Barajas Airport reached the historic figure of 52 million passengers per year.