Power returning in Spain & Portugal after large parts hit by blackout

Power started to return to Spain and Portugal late Monday (April 28) after a rare blackout caused chaos in both countries, grounding planes, halting public transport, and forcing hospitals to suspend operations.

As reported by Reuters, Spain declared a national emergency on Monday, deploying some 30,000 police across the country to keep order as governments from the two countries held cabinet meetings to figure out solutions.

The cause of the power outage, which began around 10:33 GMT, is unclear, and Portuguese Prime Minister Luis Montenegro said there was "no indication" of a cyberattack.

Earlier, some parts of France also experienced a brief outage. RTE, the French grid operator, said it had moved to supplement power to northern Spain after its outage hit, Reuters reported.

In Spain, power started returning to the Basque country and Barcelona areas in the early afternoon, and to parts of Madrid on Monday night.

The lights are also gradually flickering on in various municipalities in Portugal late Monday, including Lisbon city centre. Grid operator REN said 85 out of 89 power substations were back online.

Travel headaches

The incident, however, caused headaches for travellers.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said Monday evening that around 35,000 train passengers had been rescued from trains while 11 trains remained stuck in remote areas.

Traffic jams were reported in Madrid’s city centre as traffic lights stopped working. Local radio also reported people trapped in stalled metro cars and elevators.

The outage sparked mayhem at airports in Spain and Portugal – some 200 flights, mostly to and from Lisbon, were cancelled.

According to aviation analytics firm Cirium, Lisbon airport had the most (29.6 per cent) departure cancellations in Portugal by Monday evening. A total of nine flights from the UK to Portugal were also grounded.

Barcelona and Madrid made up most of the cancellations from Spanish airports, but zero flights from the UK to Spain were scrapped, according to Cirium

There were no reports of airports closing completely as facilities run on back-up generators.

Iberia, Spain's national airline, confirmed on X that despite the blackout, its systems were "operating at 100%".

"However, given the difficulties at several airports, we are offering all passengers with flights scheduled for today the option to reschedule their trip," it said.

At Barcelona Airport, international flights were operating with a one or two-hour delay, while many domestic flights were scrapped, reports show.

Airports in Alicante and Malaga didn’t appear to be affected. Airports in the Canary Islands and Balearic Islands also weren’t impacted and appeared to be operating as normal, with only some domestic cancellations. 

Several cruise lines, including European operators MSC, Costa Cruises and others, frequently visit Spain and Portugal. It’s believed that cruise lines made their planned ports of call yesterday, despite the outage.

A power failure of this magnitude is rare in Europe. The last major incident was in 2003 when a hydroelectric power line between Italy and Switzerland cut power across the Italian peninsula for about 12 hours.

In 2006, a power network in Germany also caused blackouts across parts of Europe and as far as Morocco.

While power in Spain and Portugal recovers, a state of emergency remained in place in Spain Tuesday morning.

The emergency status will be applied to regions that request it, officials have said.

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