Málaga Public Transport: Bus, Metro, Cercanías and Taxi

From the Cathedral the Alcazaba entrance is about 400 metres, the Picasso Museum about 250, the Atarazanas market about 400 and the Roman Theatre about 300. Muelle Uno and the Pompidou are a ten-minute walk down through the Parque de Málaga. La Malagueta beach is a further ten.

Only two places in this guide need a vehicle: Gibralfaro Castle, which is a steep 20-minute climb from the Alcazaba on a paved path, and the eastern beach districts of Pedregalejo and El Palo, which are a flat 4 to 5 kilometres along the seafront and better done by bus one way.

The city's own mobility rules matter to walkers too. Electric scooters and bikes share the bike lanes, not the pavements, under article 40 of the Ordenanza de Movilidad, and riders must be 16 and helmeted. A rental scooter on Calle Larios is breaking the rule, not exercising it.

The seafront path from the port to El Palo is the one stretch where a bike is faster than a bus, which is why the three-hour bike tour follows it.

The single fare is the number a visitor pays. Everything below it depends on the state and municipal subsidy that runs to 31 December 2026, so if you are reading this in 2027 the ten-trip fare and the free ride for under-15s may have moved.

The Lines a Visitor Rides

Bus 35 to the Gibralfaro castle is the line every guide names, and the tour listings this site reads put it at roughly every 30 minutes from the centre for the single fare. We print that as the operators' description, not as a verified EMT timetable, because EMT's own page was unreachable in Q3 2026. The same applies to bus 2 to La Concepción botanical garden, the seafront lines to Pedregalejo and El Palo, and the night lines: they exist in every listing and in the Ayuntamiento's own material, and none of their frequencies could be read from the operator.

If the hill is your only bus ride of the trip, the hop-on bus stops at the castle on a published 30-minute loop and the ticket also covers two museums. If the bus fare matters, ask at the tourist office on Plaza de la Marina, which prints the current EMT leaflet.

Line 1 runs from Atarazanas, by the market, through Guadalmedina and El Perchel to the university district at Ciudad de la Justicia. Line 2 shares El Perchel and Guadalmedina and heads south-west to the Palacio de los Deportes. El Perchel is the stop for María Zambrano station, the bus station and the metro's customer office.

For a visitor the metro is a station shuttle and a rainy-day link to the Automobile Museum and the Russian collection near Princesa-Huelín. It does not go to the airport, the beaches or the castle.

Hours, Day by Day

Stations open at 06:25 on weekdays and 06:55 at weekends. The last closures move with the night. Frequencies are not printed in the brochure's text layer, so none appear here.

Machines take coins from 5 cents to €2, notes of €5, €10 and €20 (€50 only for a purchase of €30 or more) and bank cards. The customer office at El Perchel opens Monday to Friday 08:00 to 20:00 and Saturday 09:00 to 15:00, telephone 900 70 70 72. Two things the brochure does not state: the age at which children ride free, and the date the Guadalmedina-to-Atarazanas centre extension opened.

Both are printed here as not stated rather than guessed.

The two city stations are Málaga Centro-Alameda, by the river at the foot of the Alameda Principal, and María Zambrano, where the Cercanías platforms are underground below the high-speed hall. The C1 runs from both through the airport to Fuengirola. The C2 runs inland to Álora.

El Chorro, the Caminito del Rey station, is not on the Cercanías map. It is served by Media Distancia trains, which is why the Caminito del Rey page treats it separately.

Paying at the Gate: Cronos

Renfe's Cronos system charges a contactless bank card or phone at the gate for the zones travelled. Two rules decide whether it is cheap: you must validate on entry and on exit, or the maximum fare for every zone is charged. And from the fifth trip on the same card a 40 percent discount applies automatically.

A family arriving at the airport pays the same either way. A couple commuting to the beach for a week comes out well ahead by tapping the same card every time. Which zone the airport sits in is drawn on Renfe's April 2025 fare map as a graphic and is not legible in the document's text, so the airport page prints the €1.80 figure with that caveat rather than as a certainty.

Three tariffs cover the city, chosen by the clock and the calendar. Tariff 1 is a working weekday from 06:00 to 22:00. Tariff 2 is nights, weekends and holidays by day, and the daytime hours of Feria and Semana Santa.

Tariff 3 is Friday and Saturday late nights, holiday nights, and Feria and Semana Santa from 20:00 to 06:00. Airport pickups use their own tariffs 4, 5 and 9, which the airport page prints in full.

Supplements are fixed by the same resolution and are the only extras a driver may add.

Ride-Hailing, Radio Taxis and Lost Property

No official page fetched for this site publishes a ride-hailing fare, so this page does not compare Uber or Cabify with the meter. What can be said is that a licensed taxi's meter is a regulated maximum and an app's price is whatever the app shows at that minute. Radio taxis answer on 952 333 333, 952 320 000, 952 040 804 and 952 040 404.

Anything left in a cab goes through the municipal lost-property line on 951 926 111. The Ayuntamiento also publishes orientative prices from Plaza de la Marina to the coast and the day-trip towns. Those sit on the day trips hub, where they can be set against the coach fares and the tour prices.

The station opened in 1985, has 39 platforms and is under a kilometre from the old town. The metro stop is El Perchel, three minutes away. It is open 06:00 to 01:00, and a side door is opened for buses that arrive or leave between 01:00 and 06:00.

Information is on 952 350 061 daily 07:00 to 21:00. Alsa sells at windows 4 and 5, Avanza and Portillo at 14 and 15, Daibus to Madrid at window 20. Several rural operators sell on the bus.

Left luggage is not stated: the station's own consignas page returns a 404. A taxi rank works around the clock at the door, and the Airport Express bus calls here at peak frequencies the station describes as no worse than every 20 to 25 minutes.

The consortium fares apply to the metropolitan lines such as Málaga to Mijas and the airport to Santa Amalia line, not to the long-distance Alsa and Avanza coaches, whose fares only appear inside their booking engines and are therefore not printed on this site. Alsa's Nerja route page does state more than 47 services a day, the first at 06:30 from the station and the last at 23:05 from the Puerto stop. The Nerja page uses that, and the Ronda page explains why the coach operator for that route could not be verified.

• Day pass: none on the EMT, metro or Renfe pages we could read. The CTMAM fares page lists a 'bono diario con viajes ilimitados' at €2.50 ($2.91) without a line label in its text layer, so we cannot say which line it covers. Ask at the station before relying on it.
• Transport card: the EMT ten-trip card at $0.58 (€0.50) a ride is the visitor's card for buses. The metro's stored-value card at $0.96 (€0.82) a ride is the visitor's card for the metro. The CTMAM Tarjeta de Transporte is accepted on the metro and interurban buses and can be topped up at metro machines. None of the three covers all four modes, and a contactless bank card is accepted at metro and Cercanías gates, which for a short stay is the simplest card of all.
• App: neither EMT nor the metro brochure names a ticketing app in the pages we could read. Renfe's app carries Cercanías timetables, which its website does not render as readable text.
• Tourist bus: the City Sightseeing 24-hour pass is the closest thing Málaga has to a tourist transport card, and its ticket also opens the Carmen Thyssen and MIMMA museums. It costs more than a week of EMT rides. Buy it for the Gibralfaro climb and the museum entries, not as transport.

Which would we buy? For a two- or three-night stay in the centre, nothing: a contactless bank card tapped at the Cercanías gate on arrival, coins for the one bus up the hill, and a taxi home on the late night. The what Málaga costs page runs that as a line in the daily budget.

Spain publishes minimum-service resolutions for every transport strike, and the state ministry's two pages are the ones to check: the rail list, whose latest entry in Q3 2026 was a resolution of 28 July 2026, and the aviation list, which carries an indefinite cleaning-contractor strike at Málaga airport that began on 7 August 2026 and affects the terminal, not the flights. Each resolution is issued days before the strike and fixes the percentage of trains or flights that must run. The metro, EMT and the consortium buses fall under the Junta and the Ayuntamiento for minimum services, and their page could not be located this session, so for a city-bus strike the tourist office on Plaza de la Marina is the place to ask.

The airport page says what a rail stoppage does to the C1.