Officials said 37 people were injured as Spain observes three days of mourning after 42 people were killed in an earlier train collision.
Published on January 21, 2026
One person has been killed and dozens injured after a Spanish commuter train crashed into the rubble of a wall that collapsed on railway tracks outside Barcelona, emergency workers said.
The crash on Tuesday came just two days after a separate incident in Gelida municipality, about 40km (25 miles) west of Barcelona in Catalonia, northeastern Spain. 42 people died in the train collision In the Andalusia region in the south of the country.
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In televised comments from the scene of Tuesday’s accident, Claudio Gallardo, inspector of the fire service in the Catalonia region, said 37 people were injured, four of them seriously, and the train driver was killed.
“Four are seriously injured and one person is dead,” Gallardo said, adding that all passengers were evacuated from the crash site.
Catalonia’s civil protection agency posted on social media that “a retaining wall collapsed onto the tracks, causing a passenger train accident”.
Spain’s rail operator ADIF said heavy rain across the region this week made the wall likely to collapse.
The latest accident comes as Spain observes three days of mourning for the victims of Sunday’s fatal train crash, which happened about 800km (497 miles) near Adamuz in Cordoba province in Andalusia.
Sunday’s accident occurred at 7:45 pm local time when the tail section of a train carrying 289 passengers from Malaga to the Spanish capital Madrid derailed and collided with a train bound for Huelva, another southern city from Madrid, according to ADIF.
The front of the second train, carrying 184 people, was struck, causing its first two cars to derail and slide down a 4-metre (13-ft) slope.
Some bodies were found hundreds of meters from the crash site, according to Andalusia regional president Juanma Moreno.
Spanish Transport Minister Oscar Puente called the devastating accident “really strange”, as it happened on a straight line and neither train was speeding.
Puente said officials have found a broken section of track that may be related to the origin of the crash, but that is only a hypothesis and it could take weeks to reach any conclusions.
“Now we have to determine if it is a cause or an effect (of the derailment),” Puente told Spanish radio Cadena Ser.
At this point, “all assumptions are open”, he said.
Al Jazeera’s Natacha Butler, reporting from Córdoba in southern Spain, said the latest accident would put a lot of pressure on the Spanish government and rail authorities to “assure people that they can catch trains in Spain and that it is safe”.