Madrid, 6 April 2011,

(by Ton Zijlstra)

The Spanish Cadastre has launched a mass download service for cadastral data, allowing re-use by citizens and businesses for both commercial and non-commercial purposes. The official launch of the service (which we announced late March) was attended by over 300 people from almost 200 interested organizations.

Data on 75 million real estate properties in Spain can now be accessed for download an re-use, and ensures free access to all digital cartography material. This is a massive amount of data.

In a press release the Spanish Ministry for Economy and Finance (links to PDF in Spanish) says "Electric utilities, telecommunications, construction and infrastructure management companies, and all those who require a better knowledge of the territory, now have the opportunity to reuse this information, including for commercial purposes, and generating new products and offering customers high value-added services.Also, many companies specializing in the analysis of the real estate market or involved in real estate in various other ways, will also benefit from this information, which describes in precise characteristics of all the buildings and parcels, as well as uses to which they are intended."

"The launch of this service is a direct consequence of the recently approved Sustainable Economy act, which incorporatedreform of the Land Registry Act, allowing all digital cartography and descriptive information about the property is accessible on-line for free through the Cadastral Electronic Office."

To be able to access the data a re-user must identify itself digitally and accept the terms and conditions attached to the data. Those terms and conditions are described in more detail in a resolution by the Spanish Cadastre describing also the data access and available data formats. (PDF in Spanish)