Which Spanish coastal towns shut for the winter

The source is the monthly Seguridad Social files covering every municipality in Spain. The agency publishes two families of them, and they answer different questions. In one the municipality comes from the worker's registered address; in the other from the address of the contribution account, that is the place of work. We use the second: the question is whether a business is open in this town, not where its waiter sleeps.

Three activities are counted together: food and drink, accommodation, and retail. Each on its own leans one way — food is the most season-sensitive, retail the steadiest, because shops live on residents. The sum weights them as they actually exist in that town: where there is much retail and no hotels, retail decides.

The divisor is the year's peak, not July. On the Canaries the peak falls in winter, and dividing by summer would put those towns above one. The peak month is published beside the ratio and says something about the town on its own.

The 1–5 scale is the share that shuts: five when less than a tenth closes (0.90 and above), four under a quarter (0.75), three at 0.60, two at 0.45, one below that.

Two source caveats are kept apart. Values under five are published as “<5” — unknown, not zero. A total with one masked component is published as a lower bound like “>=1097”: the number is known to within four units, and those series are flagged in the monthly download.

Five places in the base are villages inside someone else's municipality. No state figure exists for them, so the table shows the whole municipality's figure with an explicit note. The winter score on their own pages stays an estimate.

Menorca. A local outlet counted food-and-drink accounts in July and January and got 694 against 332 — 0.48. The same count over the four island towns in our base gives 0.48.

The Valencian coast. The hoteliers' association publishes the share of accommodation places shut in winter: Peñíscola 54.8%, Oropesa 47.4%, Benicàssim 41.4%, Gandía 32.2%. Our accommodation figures run in the same order; an exact match is impossible because they count hotel bed places and we count contribution accounts.

Stability. The same count on 2024 data differs by 0.02 on average, and the 1–5 score matches for 117 places out of 132. The figure describes how a town is built, not the weather of one year.

The dataset is published under CC BY 4.0: any use, commercial included, provided the source is credited with a link.

Relocoast. Winter openness of Spanish coastal towns, 2025. Computed from Seguridad Social data. https://relocoast.com/en/data/winter-openness

Primary source: Seguridad Social statistics