More than 10,000 people were left stranded in Spain after cable thefts along a train route and a technical issue disrupted high-speed rail travel on Sunday and Monday, officials said.
It was the latest ordeal for Spain, which is still reeling from a power outage last week, one of the worst in recent European history. The cause of the blackout remains unclear.
Oscar Puente, the transport minister, called the thefts a “serious act of sabotage” in a social media post.
Mr. Puente said that the Spanish national police force was investigating thefts at five locations on the line between Madrid and Seville. He said those were partly responsible for widespread travel interruptions on Sunday, which is observed as Mother’s Day in Spain.
It was unclear who had stolen the cables, and why, but Mr. Puente described the episode as a theft of “low-value cable” most likely meant to cause havoc.
“Whoever did it knew what they were doing because there were no cameras, and the financial gain is absolutely negligible compared with the enormous damage,” Mr. Puente told the broadcaster Cadena Ser in Spanish on Monday.
“It’s a fairly coordinated action,” he told the “Today for Today” radio program.
Mr. Puente said in a post on X on Monday morning that high-speed rail service should be back to normal by the afternoon — almost a full day after the cable thefts were reported.
The cable thefts, which occurred before 6 p.m. on Sunday, were not the only reason for the disruptions, Álvaro Fernández Heredia, the president of Renfe, Spain’s national rail company, wrote on X.
Mr. Fernández Heredia also blamed a technical issue for the situation, which he said had affected more than 10,000 passengers.
After the thefts, a train also “snagged, dragging the overhead power line,” he wrote in Spanish. Train traffic was halted as the issue was resolved, he added.
The cascading challenges left travelers stranded at stations and trapped on trains for hours, just as passengers were during the widespread electricity outage last week.
Inés Sánchez, a high school teacher who lives in Madrid, said she was stuck on a train for 10 hours. Ms. Sánchez, 37, was supposed to return from a trip from Seville hours earlier, at 10 p.m., but she did not arrive until 6 a.m., and went to work immediately after showering and changing.
“This morning I’ve been teaching like a zombie,” she wrote in a WhatsApp message.
Javier Santos, 31, who works in quality assurance in Madrid, was returning home from a trip to Huelva, on Spain’s southwestern coast, with friends when the train suddenly stopped. At first, he wrote in a direct message on X, they were told that they would be stopped for only about 30 minutes.
But soon, as news reports started circulating about the disruption, they realized that they would probably be on the train for hours. Passengers flooded the bar car, and products quickly started selling out, Mr. Santos said. It soon became clear he was going to miss a Mother’s Day dinner with his parents and brother.
“The trip felt endless,” he wrote.
His train arrived in Madrid at about 11:30 p.m., about eight hours after it had departed, on a trip that would typically take about four or five hours. To him, the ordeal felt like a sign of a broader national challenge.
“From my point of view, they say that what happened yesterday was due to copper thefts in several locations, but the reality is that there is not enough investment in infrastructure,” Mr. Santos wrote, adding, “Spain’s debt keeps rising, yet we don’t see improvements in people’s everyday lives.”
