Every number, and where it came from.

With the archive at /data you can recompute by hand any published figure and any position in the Index. If your result differs, the mistake is ours.

The rule everything else follows

We only publish figures you can find at their source. Where a source publishes no value, the field stays empty and the page tells you so.

What a reading is

A reading is one indicator, for one municipality, taken from one named source on one stated date. It stores the value, the unit, the source name, the source URL, the period the source itself says the figure describes, and the date it was read.

Readings are appended and never updated or deleted. Refreshing a figure writes a new row; it does not replace the previous one. The pages show the most recent reading. The full series is downloadable at /data.

The Verithic Index

The Index ranks towns on the criteria you choose. That is why the same towns come out in a different order for a family that needs a school within walking distance and for someone who flies every week.

• · Each criterion is converted to a percentile inside a zone: how many of the other towns in the zone do worse on it, from 0 to 100. The zone is every published town, or a single comarca when you filter by one and it has at least 5 towns.
• · You give each criterion a weight from 0 to 6. Until you move anything, every weight is 3.
• · A town's Index is the weighted average of its percentiles. A criterion with no reading for that town drops out and the remaining weights are renormalised; the page never fills a gap.
• · Barcelona is the destination, so it isn't scored on minutes to Barcelona. Its walk to the beach and to school depends on the neighbourhood, so those criteria don't count for it either.
• · The weights travel in the address, so a ranking you share arrives exactly as you built it.

Method dimensiones-v1 (weights of 17/10/2026): each figure becomes its percentile among the published towns of its area (how many are worse, from 0 to 100); each dimension's index is the plain average of its figures' percentiles, with no weights inside the dimension and no adjustment per town. A dimension needs data for 2 in 3 of its figures; otherwise it has no index and the reason is given. An index is never shown without its dimension and its figures.

A town's index is a percentile: it can change when new towns join its area or when a new figure is read. That is why every index and every ranking carries its cut-off date (the latest reading of the figures it uses) and the number of towns it was computed with.

• · Cost: the price per m² of used homes, the average contracted rent and the IBI on an average home
• · Connections: the full public transport trip to central Barcelona, departures per hour towards Barcelona between 7 and 9 a.m. and the full public transport trip to the airport
• · Services nearby: the walk to the primary school, the distance to the nearest acute-care hospital and the distance to the nearest international school
• · Space: population density and the average size of used homes sold
• · Surroundings: tourist-use homes per 100 residents, the official natural hazard level, hot days and cold nights a year and the walk to the beach

Ranking profiles and their weights

• · Family with children: Services nearby ×3, Space ×3, Cost ×2, Connections ×1, Surroundings ×1
• · Moving from abroad: Surroundings ×4, Services nearby ×3, Connections ×1, Space ×1
• · Calm and space: Space ×4, Surroundings ×3, Cost ×1

More for less: the towns with Connections 65 or more, Services nearby 65 or more and Cost 60 or more (in Cost, 100 is the most affordable). They come only from the indices by dimension.

A town is on the frontier when no other town has, at the same time, the same or fewer public transport minutes to Plaça Catalunya and the same or lower registered price per m². Two figures, no weights, no index. Worked out for the whole area and for each comarca.

A town needs at least 30 resale-home sales in the period (the median is 142): below that, a handful of sales moves the average. Price: Generalitat de Catalunya, Secretaria d'Habitatge — compravendes registrades, resale homes sold from July 2025 to June 2026. Minutes: the town page's public transport ones, door to door, leaving 7–9am on a weekday, waits and changes included; a town with no useful service 7–9am is left out. Since 17/10/2026 the minutes are by public transport; before, by car with no traffic. November 2026 edition, read on 3 November 2026. See where you pay less

How long it takes by public transport to get from one town to another, leaving between 7:00 and 8:50 on a working Tuesday. The Match, the map and the town page use it when you pick a town as your place of work.

The time runs from the centre of the town of origin to the first stop less than 1.5 km from the centre of the town of destination. It is the median of the departures in that window, waits and changes included. Going from A to B does not take the same as coming back from B to A, and Verithic keeps each direction separate.

Barcelona

• · 124 × 124 towns, 15,252 journeys (each town against the other 123). 14,315 have minutes (94%) and 937 are left without a figure, each with its reason.
• · For 20% of the pairs with minutes in both directions, going and coming back differ by more than 15 minutes.
• · 118 towns are offered as a place of work, those that at least 80% of the others can reach; where a pair is missing, the Match uses the car with no traffic and says so.
• · Source: public transport timetables in Catalonia (ATM, Generalitat, FGC and Renfe Rodalies); travel times calculated by Verithic. Read on 20 October 2026.

Madrid

• · 179 × 179 towns, 31,862 journeys (each town against the other 178). 18,808 have minutes (59%) and 13,054 are left without a figure, each with its reason, with no car fallback between Madrid towns.
• · 9 towns in the sierra (lines 720 to 728) have no timetables at the source: they show “the source publishes no timetables”, never a zero.
• · For 32% of the pairs with minutes in both directions, going and coming back differ by more than 15 minutes.
• · 118 towns are offered as a place of work, those that at least 60% of the others can reach.
• · Source: timetables from the Madrid Regional Transport Consortium and Renfe Cercanías; Metro on the timetable of 26 May 2026, the latest the Consortium publishes; travel times calculated by Verithic. Read on 3 November 2026.

The full matrices: Barcelona · Madrid

The Match

The Match asks seven questions about how you want to live (the sea, getting into Barcelona, children and schools, hospital, budget, the yearly bill and the kind of town) and reads the same figures as the Index. Five shortcuts fill in common cases, and you can change any answer from the results. Every result carries its reasons for and against, each tied to a figure with its source and date, so you can disagree with the weighting and still use the data.

Your limit on minutes comes first. If you pick a place of work and a maximum number of minutes, the Match lists first the towns that reach it in time, by fit (at equal fit, by name). Towns over your limit, and towns we have no minutes for, come after every town inside it, in a block of their own and without a percentage, so none of them can rank above a town that makes it. With “Close to my work”, inside each block the fewest minutes come first.

The weights, exactly as the code uses them

Every answer in the Match becomes a criterion with a score and a weight. The score runs from a floor, the lowest any town can get on that answer (the Floor column), up to 1. A town's percentage is Σ weight × (score − floor) ÷ Σ weight × (1 − floor): 0% is the lowest possible score on everything you asked for and 100% the best. A criterion with no reading for a town drops out, and the screen says so. A must-have works as a filter and adds no weight.

The Index: profiles and minimum coverage

In the Index every criterion starts at 3 out of 6. A town is only ranked if it has a reading for at least 10 of the 13 criteria. The three ready-made profiles shift these weights (criteria not listed are at 0):

• · Family with children: Low property tax (IBI) 2, School within walking distance 5, Price per m² 4, Public transport to Barcelona 2, Few tourist flats 3, Hospital with 24-hour A&E nearby 2, More space (lower density) 5, Low natural hazard 3.
• · Moving from abroad: Close to Barcelona 2, Close to the airport 2, Beach within walking distance 4, International school nearby 6, Mild climate 3, Few tourist flats 3, Hospital with 24-hour A&E nearby 2, More space (lower density) 3.
• · Peace and space: Beach within walking distance 1, Price per m² 2, Mild climate 3, Few tourist flats 5, More space (lower density) 6, Low natural hazard 4.

What is deliberately not scored

• · Income, unemployment and the other socioeconomic indicators. Published as context, never scored: ranking towns by who lives there is not a criterion we will publish.
• · Rental market depth, the number of registered rental contracts. It shows how reliable a rent figure is, so it is context rather than a score.
• · Anything that only a portal or an agency holds, such as asking prices or time on market. The Index only uses figures that public sources publish.

What this product doesn't claim

• · It isn't an estate agency and has no properties on its books, off-market or otherwise.
• · It doesn't predict prices. Every figure is a reading of something already published.
• · It isn't a valuation. A score compares public indicators; it gives no opinion on a specific property.
• · It doesn't negotiate mortgages or act for a buyer.
• · Featured professionals are always marked as sponsored and never change the order of the Index or the Match.

Changes to this method

Version 2.5, 27 October 2026: this page names the sources of the figures, with the Notariado's attribution word for word and the list of sources for the area around Barcelona and for the Community of Madrid, the same lists each town page ends with. No weight and no figure changed.

Version 2.4, 27 October 2026: this page now publishes the minutes between towns (Barcelona and Madrid, read on 20 October 2026) and the rule of the limit on minutes in the Match, which has applied since 20 October 2026: towns over your limit come after every town inside it. No weight changed.

Version 2.3, 10 October 2026: the Match percentage is measured from the lowest possible score of each answer (the Floor column in the weights table), not from 0. Before, 0% could not be reached: every answer had a minimum score above 0. The weights did not change, and the order of the towns only shifts, in a few cases, among towns missing a figure.

Version 2.2, 3 October 2026: the weights of the Match and the Index profiles are published on this page and in /data/constantes.json. No weight changed: they were moved out of the code into one table that the calculation and this page both read.

Version 2.1, 29 September 2026: the Match asks seven questions before showing a result (the kind of town joined the route) and gained three shortcuts: working from home, retiring by the sea and first home.

Version 2.0, 27 September 2026: the Verithic Index and the Match replace the market score and the opportunity score, retired on 24 September 2026 together with the investor pages. The Index gained six criteria: international school nearby, mild climate, few tourist flats, a 24h A&E hospital nearby, more space (lower density) and lower natural hazard (Civil Protection's flood and forest-fire classifications).

Version 1.0, 19 September 2026: first published statement of the method.

Download the archive · See when each source was last read