Historical Municipal Boundaries of Spain (1900-2001)

Municipal boundaries of Spain for each population census between 1900 and 2001, together with provinces, judicial districts and electoral districts (Cortes of the Restoration in 1920 and constituencies of the Second Republic in 1931, 1933 and 1936) built from them, and the census figures of every municipality from 1842 to 2011. All maps derive from a single partition of the territory, so they have no gaps or overlaps and can be aggregated consistently. Boundaries of historical municipalities are an approximate reconstruction. Geometries are downloaded from 'Zenodo' and cached locally.

mapSpainHist

English · Castellano · Català

mapSpainHist is an R package with the municipal boundaries of Spain for each population census between 1900 and 2001 (1900, 1910, 1920, 1930, 1940, 1950, 1960, 1970, 1981, 1991 and 2001) and the higher-level territorial units built from these municipalities: provinces, judicial districts and historical electoral districts. It also includes the basic census figures of every municipality between 1842 and 2011.

All maps come from a single partition of the territory, so they have no gaps or overlaps and can be aggregated without leaving holes between units.

Important warning. The shape of most historical municipalities is an approximate reconstruction. The maps are especially useful to represent municipal data graphically, but they must be used with caution when geographic variables such as area or distances matter. See the methodology.

Installation

# Development version, from GitHub
# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("pauvallprat/mapSpainHist")

The geometries are downloaded from Zenodo the first time they are used (about 6.5 MB) and stored in a local cache; afterwards they are read directly from disk.

Usage

library(mapSpainHist)

# Municipalities of the 1930 census, with census figures
m1930 <- esp_get_munic_hist(1930)

# Canary Islands next to the Peninsula, as in the `mapSpain` package, with their box
m1930 <- esp_get_munic_hist(1930, moveCAN = TRUE)
library(ggplot2)
ggplot(m1930) + geom_sf() + geom_sf(data = mapSpain::esp_get_can_box())

# Higher-level units
esp_get_prov_hist(1930)   # provinces (available for every census)
esp_get_pj_hist(1910)     # judicial districts (1900-1930)
esp_get_circ_hist(1920)   # districts for the Cortes of the Restoration
esp_get_circ_hist(1933)   # constituencies of the Second Republic (also 1931 and 1936)

# Tables
head(censos)    # census figures of every municipality, 1842-2011
head(unitats)   # higher-level unit of every municipality

Documentation

• Introduction
• Higher-level units and data aggregation
• Guide to functions and data
• Methodology, sources and warnings

The documentation is also available in Spanish and Catalan.

Problems and suggestions

If you find an error in the maps or the data, or have a suggestion, use the contact form, write to [email protected] or open an issue on GitHub.

How to cite

If you use the package and/or its data, please cite them. You can get the reference with:

citation("mapSpainHist")

• Vall Prat, P. (2026). Historical municipal boundaries of Spain, 1900-2001 [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23663208

Licenses

• R package (code and the bundled censos and unitats tables): MIT license.
• Zenodo data deposit (geometries, census tables and GeoPackage): Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).

The reference municipal boundaries derive from SIANE (© Instituto Geográfico Nacional, CC BY 4.0), downloaded for the earliest year available in the mapSpain package; census figures come from the population censuses of the INE; municipal changes from the document by the Ministerio de Administraciones Públicas Variaciones de los municipios de España desde 1842. See the methodology for details.