Regions

If you’re interested in the Spanish regions, you have arrived at the right place! We have described a lot of them with particularly travel tips for visiting them.

Overall, Spain has 17 parts, named “autonomous communities”. Each community is – obviously – part of the country, but has its own judicial powers. And each community also has its own cultural traditions. Sometimes they can be quite different from each other. They may even have different languages. Each autonomous community has its own capital. Some of them have the same name as the community itself, such as Madrid – both the city and the community are named Madrid.

You can compare these 17 communities to the states in the United States. They are not entirely the same, but the system is somewhat similar, and it’s a fair comparison to make things simple.

To make it even easier to understand, we will simply refer to the autonomous communities as regions. It’s a non-political term that is easier to use for a lot of purposes.

Here are the autonomous communities (or regions) of Spain:

  • Andalusia
  • Aragon
  • Asturias
  • Balearic Islands
  • Basque Country
  • Canary Islands
  • Cantabria
  • Castilla-La Mancha
  • Castilla y León
  • Catalonia
  • Extremadura
  • Galicia
  • La Rioja
  • Madrid
  • Murcia
  • Navarre
  • Valencian Community

Spain also has two cities located in Africa – they are named Ceuta and Melilla, and they are not considered autonomous communities in the same way as the ones above are. Yet they are still Spanish territories.

Of the 17 main regions, 6 of them have other languages besides Spanish. Catalan is spoken in Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and in the Valencian Community. Occitan is spoken in some parts of Catalonia. In Galicia, they speak Galician along with Spanish, and in the Basque Country and Navarre, they use Basque just as much as Spanish.