The geographic center of Spain, its regions and provinces

The centers already known

Cerro de los Ángeles (Getafe)

The traditional center of the peninsula. We use the IGN geodetic marker on its summit. The center of mainland Spain lies 12 km to the northeast, in Madrid, and that of the Iberian Peninsula including Portugal 47 km to the west.

Andalusia: Monturque (Córdoba)

According to a report by Spain’s National Center for Geographic Information, Andalusia’s center of gravity is in Monturque. Ours falls in the same municipality, 0.5 km to the northwest: the two calculations agree.

Galicia: Nugallás (Antas de Ulla)

A monolith at Nugallás marks the center of Galicia, with its coordinates engraved; the Royal Galician Academy credits the calculation to the IGN. Ours falls in the same municipality, 0.2 km to the southeast.

Catalonia: Pinós (Lleida)

Near the Pinós sanctuary, in the Solsonès area, a marker shows the geographic center of Catalonia. Ours falls in the same municipality, 4.6 km to the south; we could not find the method used to fix it.

We found no official published centers, with their method, for the other regions or for the provinces. If you know of one, tell us and we will compare it.

Method

What “center” means here

There is no single definition of a “geographic center”. We use the most common one: the centroid of the area, its center of gravity. It is the point where a cut-out of the territory, of uniform thickness, would balance.

We compute it on the GRS80 ellipsoid (the one used by ETRS89, Spain’s official reference system) in an equal-area projection, Lambert azimuthal, so every part of the territory weighs exactly what it measures. The projection is centered on the result itself, repeating the calculation until the center stops moving, so the shape is barely distorted around it.

With and without islands

The main center is that of the mainland, without islands, which is what the U.S. Geological Survey does for the states. For regions and provinces with islands we also give the center including them; in almost all of them it moves less than a kilometer.

Mainland means land connected by land to the peninsula in the official boundaries, plus Ceuta, Melilla and Llívia (an enclave in France). Archipelagos have no mainland: for the Balearic Islands, the Canary Islands, Las Palmas and Santa Cruz de Tenerife the main center is that of the whole archipelago, which usually falls at sea, and we also give the center of the largest island.

Data

The boundaries are the IGN municipal boundaries at full resolution (Base de Datos de Divisiones Administrativas, August 10, 2026): each province and region is built from its municipalities, including shared lands such as the Bardenas Reales. For the Iberian Peninsula we add mainland Portugal, Andorra and Gibraltar from Natural Earth.

For each center we give the municipality it falls in, the nearest inhabited place and the nearest town of over 1,000 people, from the IGN populated places (IGR Poblaciones), with the distance and direction from them. We checked every center against a second, independent calculation (the center of gravity on the sphere, with the website’s simplified boundaries): no province or region differs by more than 60 m.

Why the centers do not all agree

The same territory can have several “centers” depending on the definition: the centroid (this study), the midpoint between its extremes, the center of its bounding box or the point farthest from its edge. The map and scale used also matter, as does whether islands or water are counted and, in older calculations, the precision: many were done by cutting a map out of cardboard.

The Cerro de los Ángeles, a hill in Getafe just south of Madrid where the Sacred Heart monument was unveiled in 1919, is traditionally considered the center of the peninsula. With this study’s method it lies a few kilometers from the center of mainland Spain, and much farther from the center of the whole peninsula including Portugal.

How we work with data across the site