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No Spanish municipality without a photograph

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By B25es

For a long time, many Spanish Wikipedians shared the idea of finding images for all municipalities in Spain. For a long time, we didn't try to carry out that mission (if we could even call it a mission). We thought that with the photographs already in Commons, there would be an ample supply. Maybe there would be a missing village here and there, but we were sure that there was not a lot of real work to do.

Then we started to check out the situation. The number of municipalities in Spain, we thought, was about 8,100. Despite an official policy of mergers, the actual number of municipalities had increased (but fortunately not by much).

Then the hard part began. For all our guesses and suppositions, the real gap between what we had and what we needed was around 2,200 municipalities. Ten times our estimates. And in many cases, the photos available in Commons were not meaningful.

  • Gaztelu in Commons: more than fifty years old
    Gaztelu in Commons: more than fifty years old
  • Bellús couldn't be just this!
    Bellús couldn't be just this!

Some more numbers were required. Spain covers some 505,000 square kilometers, including two archipelagos, and the cities of Ceuta and Melilla in Africa. We were really lucky this time: only one municipality without a picture was placed outside the Iberian Peninsula. All others could be reached by car; sometimes just a short bus ride was needed. But sometimes we had to drive hundreds of kilometers to reach some places, and we got very skilled in finding odd routes covering as many places of interest as possible. I remember a journey from Valencia to Burgos via Ciudad Real, and other people going from Madrid to Tarragona via Albacete. Or one companion who drove all the way from Calatayud to León and back in a day taking pictures, 400 km each way.

One of the first things we discovered was that when you plan a route, time is always critical: an hour of driving time can mean ten kilometers or one hundred, but it always takes an hour.

  • Places without pictures were mainly in low density areas
    Places without pictures were mainly in low density areas

For more than five years, we've been driving and photographing. The numbers gradually improved. From March 2015 to March 2017, our wanted list was cut in half, from 2,231 to 1,126.

  • A bench in nowhere provided by a bank that no longer exists. Quintanilla de los Caballeros
    A bench in nowhere provided by a bank that no longer exists. Quintanilla de los Caballeros
  • Guardia Civil barracks in Piedrahíta. Freedom of panorama allows this picture.
    Guardia Civil barracks in Piedrahíta. Freedom of panorama allows this picture.
  • Margañán river at Cabezas del Villar. These photos help to locate others
    Margañán river at Cabezas del Villar. These photos help to locate others

We have taken 20,000 photos, and we have learned much. We have seen wonderful places nobody cares to visit. We found that the Emptied Spain exists, and is full of great people. We met many people proud of their towns that have helped us access places. We found municipalities without a cemetery, or with a part-time city hall, or built around a water tower. We learned that helipads are not transportation, but public health infrastructure. We found that the image of a country goes far beyond its monuments. We found great experiences and a challenge well worth achieving. Only 30 municipalities left to go!

  • Wikitaking Burgos
    Wikitaking Burgos
  • Wikitakers do not feed on megapixels. At least, not always.
    Wikitakers do not feed on megapixels. At least, not always.
Photographers:
  • 19Tarrestnom65
  • Adolfobrigido
  • B25es
  • diegheran
  • Diego Delso
  • Dorieo
  • Estevoaei
  • Gmauleon
  • Hovallef
  • Indalecio Ojanguren
  • Malopez 21
  • Millars
  • Nicolás Pérez
  • Rodelar
  • Trastolillo
  • Waxh:
  • Wolfang Sauber
  • Xemenedura
  • Yui K
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Municipalities in Spain.
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Great initiative and great report! Bravo! --Hispalois (talk) 00:10, 31 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed, this is a great idea! It would be great if the US could do this. ♫ Hurricanehink (talk) 04:15, 31 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
i heartily agree. When I first heard about this, I knew we had to put it in The Signpost. It even turned out that there was a distant connection to a similar project that I'd actively worked on and thoroughly enjoyed in Pennsylvania. I'll encourage anybody who is doing anything similar to this to get a list of photos and a few words together and we can do a gallery for that country, state, province, metro area, etc. This should be especially good over the summer, when folks are thinking about getting out, doing something different for the 1st time in a couple of years. The project doesn't have to be "complete" - in fact I'd guess most of them will never be 100% complete. Smallbones(smalltalk) 14:47, 31 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • What a lovely thing! I've been doing the same in my home home state of North Carolina for a few years now and have visited 220 different towns, learned some cool stuff, and added over 100 photos of unique places to Commons that didn't already have any (plus several more pictures that seemed of interest). I fully encourage this activity, it's a very enriching thing to do! The Spanish Wikipedia editors should keep at it! -Indy beetle (talk) 06:31, 31 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
See above - should I pencil you in for June? Smallbones(smalltalk) 14:47, 31 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Illinois may or may not be the state with the most municipalities. Not that I'm going

to fly back and check... kencf0618 (talk) 02:10, 1 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  • What a great story. I've done something similar, as a soloist, on several occasions. At the end of 2010, I decided to spend about three months translating one Italian Wikipedia article into English each day, being an article about a significant railway station in Italy. It felt a bit like going on a tour of Italy, except that I never left my home country, Australia. Since then, I have also ventured out into the Western Australian countryside several times to photograph small towns, and have also done something similar in other places, eg East Timor. But I have generally been photographing buildings, rather than people, plates of food, piles of carrots, etc. Maybe next time I will target a wider range of subjects. Bahnfrend (talk) 13:54, 3 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • At first we centered on places, meaning mainly panoramas or monuments. But we realised that understanding a place takes more than that. So we started taking more pictures of wash houses, police stations, railways, schools, health centers... My wife and I try no to picture people, but other companions do like the subject a lot (one says that a school without pupils loses its meaning). Foodstuff is something we still don't master but it's pretty significant (everybody knows paella and gazpacho but who has tasted zarajos?) so we keep trying. B25es (talk) 10:10, 6 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • A really lovely story—images like these can really help bring places to life. It's one thing to read a stub of statistical details that says the municipality has a population of 118 as of 2006, and another to see a simple but beautiful image of the small town. — Bilorv (talk) 22:31, 3 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Small places are really worth going. We went to Toril y Masegoso in 2018. A local man was there and we told him that they were very few people, some 25 we thought. He said that population was officially 36 inhabitants, but that in fact they were only 12, and mentioned all of them one by one. That's small! B25es (talk) 10:10, 6 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • What a wonderful project! I'm very curious how you organized so much work over such a long time. Was there a talk page or project page where you coordinated? Or was this more of a real-life effort? Thank you for your hard work! ~ L 🌸 (talk) 01:16, 5 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • We have a coordination project: . We also talk a lot on Telegram. Sometimes we coordinate a lot, specially for places that are large or complex. It can be to hold a Wikitakes, as we did in Cuenca, Burgos or Zamora, but sometimes it's just that we are going to places in an extended area that cannot be done at once, and you have to know if somebody else is going or has just gone. For instance, Calera y Chozas, the last municipality we did in Toledo, is quite far away for all of us, an hour and a half from Madrid. But there were three of us planning to go! We barely avoided duplicating the effort. But any of us can go to a place on in individual activity and that's how most places have been pictured.
      I have to stress that the coordination page being in Wikipedia in Spanish does not mean that the project is only in (Castilian) Spanish. In fact Galician, Catalan, Basque and Asturian speakers have helped a lot. Galicia and Catalonia have always been above the average in this project! B25es (talk) 10:10, 6 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Such an incredible project! Much respect to you and your friends! The photos are lovely. Why do the people of Rueda create the path of carrots? What happened to the delicious carrots afterwards? (Hopefully people didn't actually walk on them?) Thanks for sharing the results of your five year project. I am reminded of Sketches of Spain by Miles Davis, perhaps a soundtrack to these impressive photographs. Best wishes, Tribe of Tiger Let's Purrfect! 21:45, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
It's your Signpost. You can help us.
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