Spanish municipality from an address

Why the address doesn’t always tell you

In Spain, the place name in an address is often a village, a beach resort or a housing development (urbanización) rather than the municipality, the area run by one town hall (ayuntamiento). Resort names like Puerto Banús, Playa de las Américas or La Manga are well known abroad, but none of them is a municipality. Even the postal code can point you to the wrong province.

The example the tool opens with is a good one: Avenida Rafael Puig Lluvina in southern Tenerife. Number 2 in Playa de las Américas belongs to Arona, while another number 2 on the same avenue, in Costa Adeje, belongs to Adeje. The two are 118 meters (390 feet) apart and have different postal codes.

Addresses that can fool you

We looked these up with the tool:

Addresses from CartoCiudad, checked against the IGN boundaries the tool uses on October 31, 2026.

La Manga del Mar Menor, the long sandbar on the Murcia coast, is split between Cartagena and San Javier, with the same place name and the same postal code on both sides. Bajauri is a village in the Condado de Treviño, a piece of the province of Burgos surrounded by the Basque province of Álava: its postal code starts with 01, Álava’s number, but its town hall is in Burgos.

How the lookup works

We search for the address in CartoCiudad, the official address database of Spain’s National Geographic Institute (IGN). It lists every street door (portal) in the country with its postal code, its village or neighborhood and its cadastral reference. Then we check which municipality that door falls in using the IGN’s official boundaries, and draw that municipality on the map.

You also get the province, the autonomous community (one of Spain’s 17 regions, such as Andalusia or the Canary Islands) and the five-digit INE code, the number the National Statistics Institute gives each municipality.

Tips for typing a Spanish address

Spanish addresses put the street type first and the number after the name: “Calle Mayor 10” rather than “10 Mayor Street”. Common street types are calle (street), avenida (avenue), plaza (square), paseo (boulevard) and carretera (road). In Catalonia, Galicia and the Basque Country many streets are officially named in the local language: carrer, avinguda and plaça in Catalan, rúa in Galician, kalea in Basque. Leave out the floor and door (“2.º B”), which only matter for the mail carrier.

Rural homes often have no street at all: their address says “diseminado” (scattered houses) or the name of the area. If you can’t find one, tap the house on the map instead.

When you’ll need the municipality

When you buy or rent a home: the property tax (IBI), the municipal capital gains tax when you sell (plusvalía) and building permits all depend on the municipality. When you register as a resident on the padrón, which you do at the town hall of the municipality where you live. And when you pay the yearly road tax on a car registered in Spain, which also goes to the municipality.