How we source our data

Every number on an es.casa city page comes from a named public source, and we say which one and when we read it. This page explains where the figures come from, how we handle the places where the data is thin, and what we refuse to print.

It is longer than a page like this usually is. That is deliberate: the whole reason to read a guide rather than a listing is that someone has done the checking, and you should be able to see the checking.

Where the numbers come from

Population and residents come from Spain's National Statistics Institute, the INE, and from the regional statistics offices: IECA in Andalusia, CREM in Murcia, IDESCAT in Catalonia. We use the official municipal register, the padrón, or the annual census, and we always say which.

Asking prices come from Idealista's published price reports, which give a figure per square metre for each municipality and, where enough homes are listed, for individual districts within it.

Climate comes from AEMET, the national weather service, and only from its valores climatológicos normales, the long-run averages it publishes for a small number of principal stations.

Transport comes from the operators: Renfe and Adif for rail, Aena for airports, and the regional operators where they differ, such as FGC in Catalonia and the TRAM d'Alacant.

Health and schools come from the regional health and education services: the Servicio Andaluz de Salud, the Conselleria de Sanitat, CatSalut, and their equivalents.

We do not use aggregator sites, "top ten towns" articles, estate agent blogs or tourist board copy. Those sources present themselves as reporting official figures and are the easiest kind to get wrong: they look tabulated, they cite a real institution, and their numbers are in a believable range. An early version of this guide took foreign-resident figures from one such article. Not one of its numbers could be reproduced from the institution it named.

Two numbers that look the same and are not

This is the single most common way a property guide misleads people, and it is almost always an accident.

Spain counts its residents in more than one way. The padrón is the municipal register. The annual census is a different exercise, run on a different basis. For the same town on the same day they give slightly different totals, usually by a few dozen or a few hundred, occasionally more.

That gap is small enough to be invisible and large enough to matter. If a page takes its population from one and its foreign-resident count from the other and divides one by the other, the percentage it prints is not a real quantity. It will look entirely plausible. Nothing about it will seem wrong.

So we never mix them. Where a page shows a population and a share of foreign residents together, both come from the same exercise on the same date, and the source line says which. Where the only figures available are from different exercises, we say so and do not compute a share at all.

What we will not print

Distances and journey times. No official source publishes a road distance or a drive time from a Spanish municipality to its nearest airport or hospital. Every such figure you see on a property site is somebody's estimate. We do not estimate them, so we do not print them.

Timetables and frequencies. We will tell you a town has a station and which services run there. We will not tell you a train takes thirty-six minutes or runs every half hour unless the operator publishes it. We removed five such claims from live pages after checking, and none of them was published by anybody.

A hospital we cannot verify. We publish the reference hospital a town is formally assigned to by its health service, not the one that looks closest on a map. In several regions that assignment simply is not published. On those pages we name the health district and say plainly that the hospital assignment is not published, rather than guessing.

Borrowed weather. AEMET publishes long-run climate averages for very few stations. Most small coastal towns have none. Rather than print a neighbouring town's figures as if they were local, those pages carry no climate table and say why. On this coast the nearest station is often a different microclimate entirely.

Superlatives we cannot support. No "best value on the coast", no "cheapest in the region". Where we compare, we name the towns being compared so you can check it yourself.

Where the data is thin, we say so

Some of the most useful things we can tell you are absences.

Idealista publishes district-level prices only where enough homes are listed. For some towns that means every district has a figure; for others only a handful do; and for a few there is no district breakdown at all. That last case matters most, because it means the municipal average is the only reference you have, and an average across a whole municipality can hide an enormous spread. So we tell you how many districts are listed and how many carry a price.

Where a town's price data is unusually thin, or its market is falling, or its hospital is in another municipality, or its railway station is not actually in the town it is named after, we lead with that rather than bury it.

Prices, and what they are not

The price figures on these pages are asking prices, not sale prices. What sellers ask and what buyers pay are different numbers, and the gap varies by town and by market conditions.

Neighbourhood price ranges are derived, not published. Idealista gives a price per square metre by district; we multiply it by a floor-area range chosen for that town's typical housing stock, and we use one range per town so that the ordering between districts always reflects the underlying figures. They are a guide to relative value between areas, not a valuation of any particular home.

Idealista revised its methodology in July 2026. Idealista states that the revision was applied retroactively where a country's series required it, so as to preserve comparability. It does not say whether Spain's series was among those restated. We report that as Idealista's statement rather than as our own finding.

When we get it wrong

We do. Every batch of city pages we have published has contained at least one claim that was plausible, internally consistent and wrong, caught by checking it against the original source rather than against our own notes.

A village was placed inside a national park when only part of its municipality is. A settlement was said to hold most of a municipality's residents when it held the largest share but not a majority. A railway line appeared on every map, had a station, and published passenger numbers, and had not carried a train in nearly five years, because the whole route runs by replacement bus.

We fix these when we find them. If you find one, tell us.

Each city page carries its own source line with the specific figures and dates used for that town.