  Highly connected and yet sparse graphs (such as expanders or graphs of high
treewidth) are fundamental, widely applicable and extensively studied
combinatorial objects. We initiate the study of such highly connected graphs
that are, in addition, geometric spanners. We define a property of spanners
called robustness. Informally, when one removes a few vertices from a robust
spanner, this harms only a small number of other vertices. We show that robust
spanners must have a superlinear number of edges, even in one dimension. On the
positive side, we give constructions, for any dimension, of robust spanners
with a near-linear number of edges.
