Six Palma flights cancelled as Madrid-Barajas Airport remains closed

Flights for Sunday evening - 21.00 and 21.40 at Son Sant Joan and Ibiza respectively - are pending confirmation. The situation at the airport in Madrid will be evaluated at 13.00, two of the four runways having been cleared of snow overnight. It is hoped that the airport will be able to reopen some time on Sunday afternoon.

The army's UME emergency unit was brought in to help with clearing snow from aircraft parking stations. If the weather doesn't deteriorate, the intention is that planes which had to be diverted on Saturday will return to their Madrid base so that they can operate on Monday.

Of the 400 or so flights on Saturday, around twenty were diverted; the rest were cancelled. For Sunday, 283 flights had been scheduled.

Otherwise, the UME has been assisting Madrid town hall in clearing snow elsewhere. Overnight it had started to freeze, bringing further disruption to public transport. Only the Metro was operating a near normal service on Sunday morning.

The snow which has affected much of Spain has been the heaviest in fifty years. In Madrid, the regional government has asked the public to help with the snow-clearance effort. On Sunday morning, Aemet raised a red alert for snowfall in the province of Teruel (Aragon) - twenty centimetres in 24 hours. There were orange alerts for Zaragoza, Aragon: Tarragona, Catalonia; and Castellón, Valencia - ten centimetres in 24 hours.