As with the UK, Spain is broken up into a variety of increasingly smaller areas to ease — although sometimes it seems as if the point is to increase — the burden of administration and to ensure that the wildly different areas and styles of living within the country are catered for at a local, as well as a national, level.
Spanish Administrative Districts
There are three main Administrative Levels within Spain, along with a fourth historical but little referred to level.
Autonomous Community
The broadest level is that of the Autonomous Communities, which are regions with the ability to set their own taxes and that have their own governments. The Canary Islands is the Community into which Lanzarote falls.
There are 18 Autonomous Communities, including Ceuta and Melilla, although these two cities which are nestled on the northern coast of Africa, are more properly classed as two seperate autonomous cities, rather than as a combined community.
Province
At the next level we have the 52 Provinces, which are roughly equal to British Counties. Each province is allocated a number which — along with other things — forms the basis of the Spanish Post Code system.
Lanzarote is in Las Palmas Province, along with the islands of Fuerteventura and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. The ID for this province is 35, hence all post codes in Las Palmas start with this number, ie 35550 for San Bartolomé.
The other province in The Canary Islands is Tenerife, which contains the islands of Tenerife, La Gomera, El Hierro and La Palma.
Municipio
The smallest level of administrative control is the Municipio, which manages the everyday functions such as maintenance of local amenities, provision of local policing and refuse collection; much as a district council would in the UK.
These local districts are normally named after the most prominent town within them, although the further south you go in Spain, you find that generally the Municipios get smaller and in fact only include one town.
Comarca
There is an additional, slightly obscure, level of administrative district in Spain known as a Comarca. This falls roughly between the province and municipio level. Basically it is a co-operative of local municipios and these days is not used much, other than for some commercial activities.
Islands
To further complicate matters, individual islands are treated separately for adminsitrative reasons and statistics are available on a per-island basis as well.
Resources
You can visit our Municipios of Lanzarote page for an introduction to each of the seven areas of the island.
The Spanish National Statistics Institute website has been very useful in preparing the information for this page, especially with reference to Population figures, which are taken at 1st January 2004.
