Travel News’ Award-winning Travel Writer JOHN TREW explores the Contrasting Faces of a delightful Citybreak Destination..

THE WORLD is divided into three types of people: Those who can do arithmetic and those who cannot. I belong to the latter category, so when the electronic board in our carriage indicated that our AVE high-speed train from Madrid to Valencia was travelling at 300 km per hour, I did a quick conversion from metric and was astonished to discover that we were whizzing through the Spanish countryside at 480 miles an hour!

Thankfully, my wife Karen is in the first category of the schoolboy joke in my first sentence. She was quick to remind me that I had to multiply by five and divide by eight to convert kilometres into miles rather than the other way round. This meant that we were travelling around 188 mph, which may be less impressive, but it is still the fastest land-speed over a long distance I have ever experienced in a lifetime of travel. What a smooth ride it was, too, with rubber-cushioned wheels running on perfectly-laid, straight track. The only time I ever had any impression of our ‘gran velocidad’ was when the railway ran alongside a road or motorway and we easily overtook speeding sports cars.

However, the speed was not the most remarkable thing about our delightful return trip – it was the excellence of the on-board service (including TV) and our totally positive experience of both railway stations, the compact Joaquin Sorolla terminal in Valencia, and Madrid’s stunning main station, Atocha.

Tourist passengers should allow an extra half-hour before departure to wander through the indoor Tropical Gardens in the old Atocha building, featuring a pond packed with more turtles than I have seen in a whole month exploring the Florida Everglades. Loads of little cafés and shops also give the place an atmosphere of Madrid street-life. In complete contrast, the adjacent AVE train terminal is a minimalist symphony of stainless-steel and glass with scores of flat-screen TVs showing travel advertisments and train information. Even if you are not a train passenger, Atocha is well worth a detour if you are visiting the Prado or Retiro Park, both nearby.

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