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When the man and woman gave into their carnal urges at the Liceu underground stop at 23.55hrs on Saturday night, they had no idea their romantic encounter would go viral within hours – nor that it had witnesses at the time.
They were seen on CCTV camera, and the metropolitan transport board is now trying to find out who they are.
Police will not be involved, since the metro firm considers their actions to be a 'civil offence' rather than a criminal one.
Managing director of the transport company TMB, Enric Cañas, admitted nobody made a complaint or alerted a member of staff, but that they were seen by security guards on camera when they were monitoring the area.
He says that according to the Railways Law and Travellers' Regulations, 'unseemly conduct' on public transport carries a fine of up to €6,000, but that the firm – which comes under the city council's jurisdiction – rarely levies sanctions of more than €300 in practice.
Security guards said the couple got off the train at Liceu, had sex on a bench on the platform and, once they had finished, got back on a train and left.
The entire incident occurred without any witnesses except via CCTV.
A guard working on Line 3 admitted these acts are 'relatively common'.
“We usually find them in the photo booths, the emergency exits or in the lifts,” said a colleague of his on Line 2.
They both remember the case of a couple having sex in a lift at the Paral·lel station 'like there was no tomorrow'.
“A woman reported them and we went straight there. We found them in fraganti and ordered them to stop and to leave. The lad begged us to give him another couple of minutes so they could finish. The girl was very drunk, she could barely speak, and he wasn't much better,” one of the guards said.
“We decided not to rock the boat, so we just waited for them to finish and then told them to leave.”
A couple of years ago at Tetuán station, a train had to brake sharply because a prostitute was performing oral sex on a male customer inside a tunnel – and if the driver had not seen them in time, they would have both been killed.
But amorous passengers are the least of their problems.
Three months ago, a huge illegal party on Line 4 between the stations Jaume I and Passeig de Gràcia on a Saturday night led to vandalism and a guard being punched.
“We've had to deal with armed passengers, thieves, fights, screaming, insults and physical aggression,” one of the guards reveals.
“I won't tell you sex on the metro is something we see on a regular basis, but what worries us more is what happens on the other Friday and Saturday nights of the year.”
A shoot-out at the Sagrada Família station on Line 2 was witnessed two years ago between rival gangs.
Politicians have shown mixed reactions to the latest incident.
Former mayor Xavier Trias (Convergència i Unió, or CiU) calls it a 'degrading of public areas', whilst PP leader Alberto Fernández Díaz says, 'we've got enough with pickpockets on the metro, and now this', whilst slamming leftist mayoress Ada Colau for 'letting Barcelona turn into an episode of Gandia Shore', the Spanish version of the USA's Jersey Shore and the UK's Geordie Shore.
But left-wing pro-independence party CUP's leader Mireia Boya pointed out, on Catalunya Ràdio, that 'having sex is not a sin' and that it was 'ridiculous to magnify a habitual action, not just in metro stations'.
As for the couple in question, another video from Barcelona metro has gone viral since Saturday night, stealing their thunder: a male passenger with his foot in the door of a stationary metro train to stop the automatic doors from shutting and it driving off, in order to give his wife time to finish urinating on the platform.
Once she had finished, the video showed her pulling up her knickers and getting on the train as though nothing had happened.
At one point on the video, the man appears to be explaining to passengers already on board why he is holding the train up.
The video was taken by mobile phone of the CCTV camera screen at Barceloneta station on Yellow Line 4, but security guards say they cannot confirm it had indeed happened on the city's metro and not elsewhere in the world.
Photograph: Barcelona Metropolitan Area Transport Board (TMB) camera footage
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