Spanish cadastral parcel lookup

How to use it

1. 1

   Type the reference or tap the map

   Copy the reference from the IBI property tax bill or from the deed (the escritura), with or without spaces, and press “Show parcel”. You can also search for an address, zoom in and tap a plot of land or a building.

2. 2

   Check it against the aerial photo

   The parcel is drawn on the map. Switch to “Aerial photo” to see the PNOA orthophoto, Spain’s national aerial imagery, underneath it and check whether the boundary the Catastro draws follows the fences, tracks and walls that are really there.

3. 3

   Read the measurements and keep them

   You get the area in square meters, hectares and acres (ours and the Catastro’s), the perimeter, the center in degrees and in UTM, and the municipality. Copy the link, open the spot in Google Maps or download the outline as KML or GeoJSON for your own use.

What it’s for

• Before you buy property in Spain

  Whether you’re looking at a village house or a plot of olive trees, see where the parcel in the listing or the deed actually is, what shape it has and how its area compares with what you’ve been told. Notaries, lawyers and the Land Registry work from the official certificate on the Sede Electrónica, not from this.

• Land you’ve inherited but never seen

  Rural land in Spain is often known only by its polígono and parcela numbers on an old tax bill. With the full reference, the tool turns that into a shape on the map and a pair of coordinates you can drive to.

• Finding a plot with no street address

  The coordinates of the center of the parcel take you there with your GPS or with Google Maps, even out in the countryside where there’s no street name or number.

• Taking the parcel into other software

  Download the outline as KML (Google Earth) or GeoJSON (QGIS), or open it in the Area calculator to measure just part of it, like a vegetable garden, a pool area or a barn.

How it’s calculated

When you search, your browser asks the Catastro’s public parcel service (its INSPIRE WFS, a standard European web service for map data) for the outline of that parcel. If you tap the map, it first asks which parcel is at that spot. Mapsfera doesn’t store or copy any of the answer: each query goes straight from your browser to the Catastro.

From that outline we work out the area and the perimeter on the WGS84 ellipsoid, the mathematical model of the Earth that GPS uses, with the GeographicLib library, without flattening it onto a map first. The center is the parcel’s centroid; if that falls outside it (in a U-shaped parcel), we take the nearest point inside. Its coordinates are given in degrees and in UTM on the ETRS89 datum (REGCAN95 in the Canary Islands), and the municipality and province come from the boundaries of Spain’s national mapping agency, the Instituto Geográfico Nacional (IGN).

The Catastro works out its own “graphic area” on the flat UTM projection. We checked seven parcels in different UTM zones, in Galicia, Catalonia, Castilla-La Mancha, Extremadura, the Valencia region and Tenerife: the Catastro’s figure matched the area of the UTM polygon to the square meter. For the six parcels over 2,000 m², ours differed from theirs by between −0.06% and +0.08%, which is at most 8 m² per hectare; for a city lot of about 400 m², by 0.18%, because on something that small the Catastro’s rounding to the square meter weighs more. That’s the effect of the projection and the rounding, not an error on either side.

What the Catastro and the cadastral reference are

Spain’s Catastro (the Dirección General del Catastro, part of the Ministry of Finance) is the national property register used for taxes. It maps every plot of land and every building in Spain except Navarre and the Basque Country, and it gives each one a cadastral reference (referencia catastral). It isn’t the Land Registry (Registro de la Propiedad), which records who owns what: the two are separate offices that are slowly being brought into line.

You’ll find the reference on the bill for the IBI (Impuesto sobre Bienes Inmuebles), the yearly property tax that every town hall charges, on the deed, on the nota simple (an extract from the Land Registry) and on any cadastral certificate. If you have none of them to hand, tap the property on the map and you’ll see the reference of its parcel.

The first 14 characters identify the parcel, that is, the land. In an urban reference, the first 7 digits are the property (5 for the city block and 2 for the parcel within it) and the next 7 characters are the sheet of the Catastro’s map it’s on. In a rural one, they’re the province (2 digits), the municipality (3 digits, using the Catastro’s own code, not the one from INE, Spain’s statistics office), the sector (a letter), the polígono, a numbered rural zone (3 digits), and the parcel (5 digits).

The full 20 characters identify one specific unit within the parcel: after the 14 come 4 digits numbering each apartment, store, parking space or storage room (0001, 0002…), and 2 check letters calculated from the previous 18. That’s why the tool notices if one character is wrong. With only 14 characters there’s no check: if there’s a typo, the Catastro will simply say it can’t find the parcel.

All the apartments in a building share one parcel: the outline and the area are those of the whole lot, not of your apartment. The built area of each unit is in the descriptive record on the Catastro’s Sede Electrónica.

Catastro area, registry area and real area: why they differ

The cadastral area is the Catastro’s, the one used for the IBI tax. For the parcel itself it comes from the Catastro’s mapping, which is made for tax purposes and at scales where a boundary can be off by a few meters. Think of it like a county assessor’s parcel map in the US: good enough to tax by, not good enough to settle a fence dispute.

The registry area is the one in the Land Registry, as it was declared when the property was first registered. It can be very old, estimated by eye or in units nobody uses anymore, and it isn’t always brought up to date.

The real area is what a surveyor measures on the ground. To bring the Catastro and the Land Registry in line with it you need a survey and the Catastro’s graphic validation report (informe de validación gráfica). That’s the route for correcting a boundary, not this tool.

Mapsfera measures the outline the Catastro draws, so its figure is close to the cadastral area (apart from the small UTM effect), not to the registry or the real one. All three are flat, plan areas: none of them counts the slope of the land.

Urban and rural parcels

The Catastro sorts properties into urban (urbana), rural (rústica) and special ones (dams, toll roads, airports, power plants…). What counts is how the town’s zoning classifies the land, not whether there’s a house on it: an empty lot inside a village is urban, and a farm building on rural land is still a rural property.

You can tell them apart from the reference itself. Rural references start with the province and the municipality, have a letter in sixth position and are known by their polígono and parcela (“polígono 7, parcela 120”). Urban ones have two letters in positions 8 and 9. In the countryside, public tracks, irrigation channels and streams usually have parcels of their own, often numbered from 9000 up; in towns and cities, streets and squares have no reference at all.

Navarre and the Basque Country

Two parts of Spain keep their own cadastre because of their historic charters (fueros), which also let them collect most of their own taxes: the Foral Community of Navarre and the three provinces of the Basque Country, Álava, Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa. Their references follow a different format, and their parcels aren’t in the national Catastro’s services.

If you type a rural reference from one of those provinces, or tap a spot inside them, the tool doesn’t ask the national Catastro: it tells you which territory you’re in and links to that territory’s official cadastre and map viewer.

SIGPAC: what it is and why it isn’t here

SIGPAC (Sistema de Información Geográfica de Parcelas Agrícolas) is Spain’s register of farmland and pasture used for EU Common Agricultural Policy payments. It starts from the Catastro’s parcels but splits them into recintos by land use (arable land, olive grove, vineyard, pasture…) drawn over the aerial photos, so the recintos don’t always add up to the cadastral area.

This tool doesn’t query SIGPAC. To see the recintos and their area, use the SIGPAC viewer of Spain’s Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food or your region’s own. To measure a recinto yourself, trace it over the aerial photo in the Area calculator.

What Mapsfera does and doesn’t do

The outline of the parcel, its graphic area and its location belong to the Catastro and reach your browser directly from its public services, at the moment you ask: Mapsfera doesn’t store, copy or serve them. What’s ours is the measuring on the ellipsoid, the center, the coordinates, the municipality from the IGN boundaries and the drawing on our map.

It isn’t official information and it isn’t valid for legal procedures, boundary disputes or sales. For that there’s the Catastro’s Sede Electrónica, with the official descriptive and graphic record of each parcel and the cadastral certificate. Owners’ names and the cadastral value (the tax value of the property) are protected data: they aren’t asked for or shown here.