Luckless Pyrenees train station gets a new direction

The story of Canfranc, a village more than 1,000 metres above sea level on the Franco-Spanish frontier, is one of vainglorious ambition and abject failure, of incompetence and corruption, of intrigue, smuggling and a century-long run of bad luck.

However, its monumental and ill-fated train station, once called the “Titanic of the mountains”, is to get a new life as a five-star hotel, half a century after the rail link through the Pyrenees which