Sources and method

Every number comes from an official or openly licensed source, downloaded and processed by script. Each layer was checked against a figure the publisher itself announced.

Places

All 333 Spanish municipalities with 25,000+ inhabitants on 1 January 2025 (INE, official population). Nothing is pre-selected.

Buying

Ministry of Housing, Valor tasado de la vivienda, municipalities over 25,000, quarterly to Q2 2026. Average of the last four quarters weighted by the number of valuations. Appraised values usually sit below portal asking prices. 31 places are not yet in the ministry's list. Check: national Q2 2026 = 2,355 €/m², as published.

Renting

Ministry of Housing, Sistema Estatal de Referencia del Precio del Alquiler (SERPAVI): real contract rents from tax returns, 2024. Median for apartments; about two years behind. Check: Madrid 13.97 €/m², Barcelona 13.68 €/m², as published.

Safety

Ministry of the Interior, Balance de Criminalidad, full year 2025, municipalities over 20,000 (includes Mossos d'Esquadra and Ertzaintza data). Rates per 1,000 residents. "Conventional crime" excludes online fraud, which is recorded where it is reported. Recorded crime only; crimes against visitors count against residents. Check: national total 2,474,156, as published.

Getting there

Airports: AENA 2025 traffic report (check: Madrid 68.2 million passengers, as published); coordinates OurAirports (public domain). Direct flights: Wikipedia airport route tables on 4 Oct 2026, split into year-round and seasonal, announced future routes excluded (they appear once they start); Brussels counts both Zaventem and Charleroi; includes nearby airports across the border (Porto, Faro, Lisbon, Biarritz, Perpignan, Gibraltar, Toulouse). Trains: Renfe timetable (Origen de los datos: Renfe Operadora); Iryo and Ouigo are not included. Coast: Natural Earth. All distances straight-line from the town centre (Wikidata coordinates).

Healthcare

Ministry of Health, Catálogo Nacional de Hospitales 2025 (hospitals in operation on 31 December 2024). Only general hospitals are used (549: 285 public, 264 private). Public means the regional health services and other public bodies; private includes mutual insurers and non-profits. "Large" means 500 or more beds, counting all buildings of a hospital complex but locating it at its main building. The catalogue gives no coordinates, so each hospital is placed at its municipality's centre; distances are straight-line.

Healthcare waiting times

Ministry of Health, SISLE-SNS, situation on 31 December 2025: mean waiting time for planned surgery and for a first specialist consultation in the public health service, per region, as each region reports it. Check: Spain 121 and 102 days, as published.

Population and age

Nationalities: INE Padrón continuo, main nationalities per municipality, 1 January 2022 (one table per province, via the INE API); the Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland and the Nordic countries are not published at this level. INE: official municipal population 1 January 2015 and 2025 (check: the 2015 sum of all municipalities equals the published 46,624,382); age groups from INE table 33571, 1 January 2022 (latest year at municipal level).

Local income

INE, Atlas de Distribución de Renta de los Hogares, income year 2023 (from tax records). Net income per person and median income per consumption unit. Check: Spain 15,036 € and Pozuelo de Alarcón 30,524 €, as published.

Holiday lets

INE experimental statistic Viviendas turísticas, May 2026: listings on the main platforms, matched and de-duplicated by INE. Check: 341,001 homes and 1,714,702 beds in Spain, as published.

Blue Flag beaches

ADEAC list of Blue Flag beaches 2026-2027 (676 of the 677 announced beaches parsed). Each beach is placed at its municipality's centre.

Walkability

OpenStreetMap (© OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL), Geofabrik extract of 4 October 2026: food shops, pharmacies, doctors and clinics, cafés/bars/restaurants, parks, bus stops, libraries and cultural venues, and markets within 800 m of each place's centre, taken as the OpenStreetMap place point named like the town, moved at most 500 m to the busiest spot (most shops, cafés, pharmacies and doctors within 400 m); this is used for 326 of the 333 places. Wikidata's official coordinates are often rounded or off the high street, and a wider ‘busiest point’ search let suburbs drift into a neighbouring city's centre, so it is only the fallback for 7 spread-out municipalities. Check: at the same points, counts from this extract match the live OpenStreetMap server for 12 cities (parks slightly lower: large multi-part parks are not counted). Two measures: everyday essentials on foot (0-6): at least 15 food shops, 3 pharmacies, 25 cafés, bars or restaurants, 2 parks, 3 bus stops and 2 libraries, theatres, cinemas or cultural centres within 800 m (our thresholds, set so that the measure separates places: 166 have all six, including 56 of the 180 towns under 50,000; doctors are left out because health centres are often missing from OpenStreetMap and the healthcare section covers hospitals); and lively centre (0-100): each count's rank among the 333 places, averaged over the eight categories, which mostly reflects town size (correlation 0.66 with log population). Check: the pharmacies mapped are compared with the 22,273 community pharmacies counted by the Consejo General de Colegios Farmacéuticos (2025).

International schools

Ministry of Education, Registro Estatal de Centros Docentes no Universitarios (RCD), queried in October 2026 for every school of the type ‘Centro Docente Privado Extranjero en España’ (369 entries): schools authorised to teach a foreign curriculum. We keep 334 schools for children: those for which the register lists infant, primary or secondary teaching, plus those with no levels listed whose name is clearly a school; business, arts, hairdressing and other training centres in the same list are left out, and so are, for the distances, schools for one nationality (6: Japanese, Libyan, Iraqi, Russian, Panamanian). Each school is located from its address with CartoCiudad, the Spanish government geocoder (272 to the building or street, the rest to the village or municipality). The curriculum is the one the register adds to the name, such as ‘(BRITÁNICO)’, or clear from the name itself; otherwise it is shown as not stated. Distances are straight-line from the town centre. Spain publishes no comparable results per school, so we do not rate them.

Match score

For each topic a place scores 100 × the share of the other places that are not better on that topic (so places tied at the best value, such as a hospital in town, all score 100). The visitor's weights (+ = 1, ++ = 2, +++ = 4) average the topics. A place without data for a topic skips it, except a missing direct flight or train, which scores 0.

Water

Ministry for the Ecological Transition, weekly Boletín Hidrológico database (reservoirs over 5 hm³, 1988 to 29 September 2026), summed per river basin (demarcación hidrográfica). Each place is assigned to its basin with the ministry's official basin boundaries. Check: 59.2% full nationally on 29 Sep 2026, as published. The islands, Ceuta and Melilla are not covered.

Climate around 2055

Escenarios-PNACC 2024 (Spain's official scenarios for the National Climate Change Adaptation Plan): 11 CMIP6 global models regionalised by AEMET (method ESD-RegBA) on a 5 km grid, via the AdapteCCa viewer (CC-BY 4.0). Scenario SSP2-4.5. We use the change from 2011-2040 to 2041-2070 (ensemble mean) and add it to the 1991-2020 station averages; the model range is shown on each page.

Privacy

Your slider settings, units and comparison list are kept only in your own browser (local and session storage) so they survive a page reload. Visits are counted with Google Analytics only if you agree; see the privacy page.

Rankings

We show published positions with a link to the publisher. We do not copy anyone's underlying data.

Climate

AEMET climate normals 1991-2020 (© AEMET, reuse permitted with credit). Each place uses the best station within 25 km, weighing distance and altitude difference (at most 250 m); temperatures are adjusted to the town's altitude at 0.65 °C per 100 m. The town point is the town centre (the OpenStreetMap place point) and its altitude comes from the SRTM terrain model; Wikidata's altitudes were wrong for some towns. Where no station qualifies (52 places), values are an estimate: the distance-weighted average of the 3 nearest stations in the same coastal or inland setting (within 75 km and at most 1,000 m higher or lower), each adjusted to the town's altitude, and marked as an estimate. We tested this on the places that do have a station by hiding every station within 25 km: the estimated monthly averages were off by 0.96 °C on average (10% of values by more than 2 °C), against 1.65 °C (31%) for the satellite-based estimate used before 6 October 2026. Frost nights and hot days for estimates are counted from daily satellite data adjusted to the estimated monthly averages.