How many metro stations does Madrid have?

How to get close to this number

Work from line length and station spacing. The network runs a few hundred kilometres of track, and urban metro stations sit roughly a kilometre apart. Dividing track length by spacing gives a station count in the low hundreds, and this method works for any metro system once you know either figure.

People underestimate this one because the city is not among the largest in the world. But network size tracks investment and construction era more than population — and as the explanation notes, this system was built in bursts of very fast public spending, which is how it ended up among the ten largest networks on Earth.

Counting stations has the same ambiguity as counting anything networked: an interchange where three lines meet may be one station or three, depending on whether you count platforms, entrances or names. Different sources use different conventions, which is why network rankings shuffle depending on who compiled them.