Road tolls in Iberia

[Robert P]

Is it possible to avoid toll roads when touring in Spain and Portugal? Our experience of continental touring is in Norway - where tolls are impossible to avoid and it is essential to have a tag. The impression I have from reading MoHoFun is that there are plenty of alternative routes in Iberia and a tag is not needed. Can anyone confirm or deny this? My main concern would be to find ourselves inadverdently on a toll road and liable to a hefty penalty.

 

[Mikeco]

I don’t consider travelling on toll roads a penalty, in bad weather especially you may be grateful to pay a few euros to travel on a decent road. We travelled from the border at Irun and paid less that 10 euros to travel to Benidorm and that was without trying to avoid toll roads but using the best route possible.

 

[chesterfield hooligan]

We tour France and Spain and never use tolls I would assume some of the larger campers use the tolls for their convenience.

 

[Abacist]

No need to use motorways in Spain or Portugal!

 

[mikebeaches]

We found most of the tolls in inland Spain pretty reasonable and much cheaper than France.

No hesitation using them when convenient for getting from A to B. A couple of times we've driven south-east from Madrid / Aranjuez towards Alicante on the AP-36 and it's felt almost like our own private highway with virtually zero traffic for mile after mile - bliss!

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[TONCAZ]

Done this loads of times, just stay on A or N roads, but if there is no other choice the AP roads aren't that bad, but there should be an N road running very close to it

 

[Solwaybuggier]

We did find in northern Portugal a few times that the road surface on toll-free main roads made us wish we’d used the parallel toll motorway!

 

[Verteuil Man]

We just came down from the east of France to just south of Alicante and paid no tolls on the motorways.

I was told a couple of years back that Spain was ordered to remove tolls on some motorways by the EU as they had funded them.

Not sure the truth of it but in 2020 there were a lot of toll booths closed at the junctions around the Valencia area.

 

[gus-lopez]

We just came down from the east of France to just south of Alicante and paid no tolls on the motorways.

I was told a couple of years back that Spain was ordered to remove tolls on some motorways by the EU as they had funded them.

Not sure the truth of it but in 2020 there were a lot of toll booths closed at the junctions around the Valencia area.

No after the 2008 crisis many toll road companies were struggling especially if they still had large borrowings that funded construction.The government eventually had to take the roads on & eventually justremoved all the charging ,except on a few routes. IN 2019 they were proposing to reintroduce tolls on the original toll roads &, in addition, to Toll most other motorways. This only got sidelined with the onset of Covid & now the higher fule prices due to the war.When ,hopefully this all returns to normal it will be reintroduced.

 

[Robert P]

Thank you all for your info, it's very helpful.