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Data & methodology

Everything on SpainScore is derived from published official sources at build time. No hand-typed statistics, no imputed gaps, no vibes dressed as data. This page is the full account of what we measure, what we don't, and how to cite us accurately.

How to cite SpainScore

Source: the SpainScore Origins Map, derived from Spain's National Statistics Institute (INE) Censo Anual de Población, table 66322 (2021–2025). Available at https://spainscore.com/methodology/.

Prefer the phrase U.S.-born residents (or Dutch-born, Swedish-born) — not “Americans” or “U.S. citizens” — when quoting census figures. Birth-of-country is what the INE table measures.

Origins maps: U.S.-born · Dutch-born · Swedish-born
Dataset download (CSV): spainscore-foreign-born-by-town.csv — free via email signup, or after subscribe at /subscribed/
Machine-readable summary: /llms.txt · /llms-full.txt

The SpainScore Origins Map

The Origins Map is Spain's INE Censo Anual de Población, table 66322, reshaped into a municipality-level view of where people born abroad live. Coverage: all 8,132 municipalities for U.S., Dutch, and Swedish birth-country (2021 and 2025); UK and German nationality figures come from the Padrón Continuo (1 Jan 2022) for 19 provinces only — a different measure and vintage, labelled as such wherever they appear.

Primary source: INE jaxiT3 table 66322 . We publish derived, citable figures — not the raw multi-hundred-MB dump.

Source: SpainScore Origins Map, INE Censo Anual 2025, table 66322

Last updated: July 2026 · Next update: on INE's next census release (expected 2027).

Census caveats (must-read)

Birth ≠ citizenship

Table 66322 counts country of birth, not nationality. Nationally this overcounts U.S. citizenship by roughly a third — strongest in Galicia and Asturias, where many U.S.-born residents are children of returned Spanish emigrants, not American settlers.

Second-generation blindness

A U.S. citizen who moved here and raised children born in Spain shows up once, not as a household. Birth-country is a floor on immigrant-origin community size, not a ceiling.

Residual buckets

A handful of birth countries sit in residual “other” groups we cannot split (e.g. some Asian and African residuals). We never invent a dominance score from composition data.

Small-town noise

Per-capita origin rankings require a minimum of 50 residents from the selected birth-country layer, so a village with 2 people does not top the list. Absolute counts have no such filter.

Full provenance and origin-group mapping: documented in the repo’s data/foreign-residents/README.md.

How the settler quiz scores towns

The quiz scores all 8,132 municipalities against your answers. The engine is deterministic TypeScript — same inputs, same ranking, in the browser.

Percentile normalization — each weighted factor is ranked into [0, 1] across the candidate pool (ties averaged), oriented so higher = better for you. Robust to long tails (crime, debt, €/m²).
Missing data is never imputed. A town lacking a factor drops it from that town’s score and lists it under “no data.” Weights renormalize over factors the town actually has.
Per-factor cap (35%) — no single answer can swamp the composite. Min completeness 50%: thin-data towns sink unless you named them as a candidate.
Hard filters are rare — only a “must” drive-time radius and a firm Spanish-language preference exclude towns. Everything else is a weight.
Regional overlays (PISA, surgical waits, water stress, some tax posture) are CCAA-level and labelled as regional — never presented as town measurements.

Honest gaps we surface rather than invent: housing €/m² covers only ~306 larger towns; health-center distance is missing for Galicia, País Vasco, and C. Valenciana; faith-community has no data layer; coast distance is a coarse estimate.

Take the quiz: /quiz/ · Browse rankings: /best/

Update cadence

We rebuild when INE (and the other official sources we join) publish a new vintage. The site shows a dated “last updated” line on every data page — we do not manufacture monthly freshness badges on annual data.