All commercial flights to Madrid land at Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas International Airport, in the Aeropuerto-Feria de Madrid. The airport s located about 12 kilometres northeast of the capital city. This nearby location means travellers save a considerable amount of time and money on their journeys.
Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas Airport, where almost 100 international airlines operate to and from a huge number of countries, handles the greatest amount of air traffic in Spain and is one of the five largest airports in Europe. Many different services can be found inside the airport, including children’s areas, coffee shops and restaurants, pharmacies, post offices, banks, car rentals, bookstores and kiosks, shops of all types, car parking, emergency areas, medical services, a police station, and nearby hotels.
The airport currently has four operating bus stations. Terminal T4, opened in February 2006, and recipient of many awards praising the design of architects Antonio Lamela and Richard Rogers, handled almost 26.8 million passengers during its first year of service. Over that same time, the airport handled a total number of 46.3 million passengers.
In March 2014 the airport was re-named Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas in honour of the first elected Prime Minister of democratic Spain, a politician who, together with other important political figures from a range of parties, guided the country through what has been called “the Spanish transition”. During this time of social and political change, Spain moved from dictatorship to being a modern constitutional democracy.
