MADRID, SPAIN - AIR traffic was returning to normal on Saturday at Madrid's Barajas airport, Europe's fourth busiest, the day after it was shut down for five hours due to a rare, heavy snowfall, airport officials said.

'The situation is returning to normal, there are two runways out of four that are open,' a spokesman for Aena, the Spanish national airport authority, told AFP, adding that of course there were some delays in flights.

'There were temperatures of minus six degrees Celsius (21 degrees Fahrenheit) overnight and the planes must go through de-icing,' she explained.

Some 985 flights in and out of the airport are expected on Saturday and by mid-morning about 100 of them had taken place, she added.

The delays however still left hundreds of travellers, many of who spent the night at the airport, waiting for flights out of the Spanish capital, an AFP photographer reported.

On Friday hundreds of flights were delayed and 52 were diverted during the period the airport was closed as the unfamiliar sight of snowfall paralysed air traffic and on the roads caused nearly 400 kilometres of traffic jams and dozens of accidents around Madrid.