[oittaa]

There are a lot of plans for international train lines in Europe and some of them are actually being built. If you check the Wikipedia page of the the Spanish rail service[1], you'll see that new connections to France should be completed sometime around 2023. Currently the only high speed link to France is from Barcelona, which makes traveling from Madrid and Spain's Northern coast to Paris more time consuming.

There's also a Helsinki-Tallinn tunnel plan, which is more like in an exploration/planning phase, but that should connect those cities and make them function almost like one. Instead of a two hour ferry ride it would be more like a 30min train ride. Øresund Bridge basically did that to Copenhagen and Malmö.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVE#Lines_under_construction

[littlecranky67]

Seems like those connections will all use the existing (standard gauge) Perpignan/Figueres route through the Perthus Tunnel in the Pyrenees. Your source mentions only one new cross-border connection but will essentially terminate shortly after the french border, with no connection to the french highspeed network. So I suspect connections to Paris from anywhere in Spain will go through Barcelona for the forseeable future.