Coordinates to municipality (Spain)

What it’s for

Spain is divided into 8,132 municipalities (municipios), each run by a town hall, and every piece of land belongs to one of them. If all you have is a point, the municipality tells you whose rules apply: who issues building or filming permits, who charges the property tax, which town hall to contact about a drone flight, or which hunting area you’re in.

It’s handy for a rural plot sold with coordinates from a survey, a geotagged photo, a hiking waypoint, or a spreadsheet of field points that needs a municipality and its INE code, the five-digit number Spain’s National Statistics Institute gives each one.

Coordinate formats it reads

Paste them however you have them. Here’s Llívia, the example on the map, written every way the tool understands:

• Decimal degrees: 42.4648, 1.982 (a decimal comma works too: 42,4648 1,982).
• Degrees, minutes and seconds: 42°27′53.3″ N 1°58′55.2″ E.
• Degrees and decimal minutes: N 42 27.888 E 1 58.920.
• UTM with its zone: 31T 416308 4701887. Mainland Spain spans UTM zones 29, 30 and 31; the Canary Islands are in zone 28.
• MGRS (military grid): 31T DH 16307 01886.
• A Google Plus Code such as 8FJ3FX7J+WR, or a Google Maps link with coordinates in it.

Special cases, checked

Here’s what the tool returns for some points that aren’t what they seem:

Calculated with the tool on October 31, 2026, using the IGN boundaries.

For the Bardenas Reales you’ll see a code starting with 53. Spain’s 81 shared commons and its 6 bits of land outside any province have no INE code because they aren’t municipalities, so we show the IGN’s own code (53… or 54…).

Common mistakes

Latitude goes first, then longitude. Swap them and Ademuz (“-1.2861, 40.0608”) lands in Kenya. The tool can only catch the mix-up when the first number can’t be a latitude (it’s over 90), and in Spain that never happens: both numbers would always work, so double-check the order.

Most of mainland Spain is west of the Greenwich meridian, so its longitudes are negative. Drop the minus sign and Ademuz (“40.0608, 1.2861”) ends up in the Mediterranean off Castellón. Writing “W” after the number works too: 3.70379 W is the same as -3.70379.

Older Spanish maps and surveys often use the ED50 datum instead of today’s ETRS89, which shifts points by about 200 meters (650 feet). Next to a municipal line, that’s enough to change the answer, so convert them first with the National grid converter.

Where the boundaries come from

From the official database of administrative boundaries of Spain’s National Geographic Institute (IGN), simplified to load quickly with an error of 11 meters (36 feet) at most. If the point is within 100 meters of another municipality, you’ll get a warning; if it falls right on the shore, within 30 meters of the coast, we give you the municipality on that shore. Distances on this page default to meters because it’s a Spain tool.