Traffic in Spain is heavily concentrated: Adolfo Suárez Madrid - Barajas Airport (MAD) alone handles about 66.2 million passengers a year, roughly 45% of the 146 million across the 4 airports listed here. That pattern is typical of a country with one dominant hub carrier feeding a single gateway.
Between them these airports operate 11 runways serving 4 cities, all on a single national clock. Every airport below links to a live map of aircraft observed within available ADS-B coverage around the field.
The next airport in the ranking is Josep Tarradellas Barcelona - El Prat Airport (BCN) at about 55.0 million passengers. The gap to MAD is 11.2 million, while the three busiest airports account for roughly 100% of traffic represented by this list. Most listed traffic is therefore concentrated at the top of the network.
The airports are spread across roughly 5 degrees of latitude and 7 degrees of longitude. The network is geographically compact enough that most domestic sectors remain comparatively short. Field elevations vary less dramatically than they do in the world's mountain-airport networks. The average across this selected set is 2.8 runways per airport.
Read airport by airport, the selected Spain network is not interchangeable: Adolfo Suárez Madrid - Barajas Airport (MAD) has 4 runways and about 66.2 million annual passengers, Josep Tarradellas Barcelona - El Prat Airport (BCN) has 3 runways and about 55.0 million annual passengers, Málaga - Costa del Sol Airport (AGP) has 2 runways and about 24.5 million annual passengers and Zaragoza Airport (ZAZ) has 2 runways and no comparable traffic figure. Those differences matter when comparing a live map. A larger passenger total indicates schedule scale, while runway count describes physical layout; neither number by itself proves how delayed, connected or operationally efficient an airport will be on a particular day.
With 4 gateways in this data cut, the Spain hierarchy is readable directly: MAD contributes 45% of the represented passenger total, BCN contributes 38% of the represented passenger total, AGP contributes 17% of the represented passenger total and ZAZ contributes 0% of the represented passenger total. That makes MAD the first gateway here without reducing BCN to a minor field, since its traffic is about 83% of MAD's.
The physical ranking differs from the traffic ranking: MAD has 4 listed runways, BCN has 3 listed runways, AGP has 2 listed runways and ZAZ has 2 listed runways. MAD is the highest of the group at 1,998 ft, against 14 ft at BCN. Those facts describe layout and setting, not a live capacity forecast; weather, active runway configuration and traffic flow still decide what a viewer sees on the map at a given hour.