How this atlas is built

01How to read a record

Every record declares whether it is confirmed, and so do its sensitive fields, one by one. A developer can be confirmed while its commissioning date is not, and the record says so field by field. The three states — Confirmado (confirmed, solid mark), Parcialmente verificado (partially verified, faint fill and dashed ring) and No verificado (not verified, hollow and dashed):

And every claim cites the source that supports it, classified by what that source can support — primaria (official documents), prensa (press), corporativa (corporate) and hueco, the missing source said out loud:

Only a primary source supports a confirmed fact. A corporate announcement or a news story is recorded with its origin — it has value, which is why it is there — but does not rise to fact. Whenever a source is cited it is archived: URLs rot; the archived copy does not.

02Gaps are not a defect

A gap is a missing source, declared out loud with its own place in the record. It is the central mechanism of the atlas, not a footnote: filling a gap with something plausible is the worst failure this project can commit, because an invented figure that looks reasonable is the one nobody catches.

Three of the gaps published right now, as they read in their records:

• The nuclear power plants. The closure calendar agreed in 2019 turned out to have no public document — it is a private protocol — so in five of the seven reactors the date is empty and declared, instead of being filled with the one everybody quotes.
• The sixteen mineral domains. None has primary-source cartography: they are freehand sketches, and the whole layer is the declared gap. They are drawn translucent with dashed borders so they cannot be read as measured boundaries.
• Tropic Seamount. The atlas records where it is and what it is called, citing the hydrographic authority that names it. It does not publish the tellurium and cobalt grades that circulate: they come from scientific campaigns this atlas has not archived.

Reporting a gap — a figure taken on faith without a primary source — is worth as much as contributing a new record. Probably more.

03The photo and the film

Each record is a photo: its state as of the date of its bulletin. Since contract 1.35, some layers also carry their film — the full time series from the same primary source, drawn on the record page itself. The first one is reservoir storage: every reservoir with its weekly bulletins since 1988.

Three rules govern it, all three enforced in CI. There is only film where there is a negative: a series requires its complete history in one archived primary source — nothing is reconstructed from sources that no longer exist, and different sources are never spliced together. Gaps stay gaps: a week without a bulletin is a week without a point, and the line breaks instead of bridging it — interpolation is invention with a good alibi. And the photo and the film may not contradict each other: the last point of the series must match what the record states, or validation blocks the whole release.

Water also has a page of its own (in Spanish): the week's bulletin, the thirty-eight-year curve and the breakdown by river basin district. There reservoirs are added up and divided to get a fill level — deriving is allowed, writing it down is not: none of it enters the data, it is computed when the page is built, and the page says so. Gas has one too — monthly, same rule — and the library gathers both along with every earlier bulletin.

The chart draws no percentages and no trends: it draws the bulletins. What you see moving is the source, not an opinion of the atlas.

04What is published today

The viewer does not read the live branch: it serves a tagged release. What you see below is exactly what release 2026.09.141 serves, read from its own manifest. Every layer can be downloaded as published, as GeoJSON under CC BY 4.0.

And it is machine-readable. The catalogue lives at /datos/manifest.json and each layer at /datos/capas/<id>.geojson, served static, without a key and open to any origin. Which routes are promised —and which are internal organs of the viewer that will change without notice— is stated in the data contract. Those routes are never served pre-compressed: it is a written guarantee, not an accident, and it is what lets you read them with plain curl, from a script without libraries, or from a desktop GIS.

And an edition can be pinned, not just cited. Every release of the public archive carries its data bundle attached — the layers, the series, the datasets and the manifest of that edition, exactly as published. All of them have one, not just the latest: an analysis made a year ago can be rebuilt with the data of the time, not today's. The release list has them all.

Greyed branches are declared and empty. The map shows its own horizon on purpose: a layer that is going to exist appears before it has a single record, so that silence is never mistaken for absence.

05How to correct a record

1. Open an issue in the repository naming the record by its identifier — for instance minerales-proyectos:aguablanca — and the source that supports the correction. A correction without a source cannot be applied: it is the only hard rule.
2. There is no pull request route for the data, and it is better said than discovered: the layers are served already built, so what is needed from you is the source, not the file.
3. Nothing is deleted. A record that stops being valid changes state — current to historical or withdrawn — and the change is recorded, with its evidence, in the changelog of the release that touches it.

Corrections are proposed in the atlas's public archive: the archived sources, the data contract and the changelog, open to anyone, no account needed. The viewer and the pipeline are developed in a private workshop — what makes a datum verifiable is not the code but the citation, and the citation lives whole in the archive.

06What this atlas cannot guarantee

Said here, not in the small print, because these are the real limits of everything above.

• A citation can be dead and still answer that it is alive. A weekly watch checks that sources are still standing, but EUR-Lex and the IGME return “200 OK” while serving an error page. When the URL promises a PDF the deception is caught; when it does not, there is no cheap way to tell, and the watch reports how many citations remain genuinely unchecked. This is the entire reason the documentary archive exists.
• An official source can contradict itself. Two mining rights in the Mining Cadastre hold two different legal statuses today depending on which export you download, same day, same registry. When that happens the atlas publishes the disagreement and downgrades the field to partially verified: it does not pick a winner.
• An official download can arrive silently mutilated. The CSV export of that same cadastre truncates vertex lists at 424 characters, and a polygon missing a corner still closes and looks correct. All geometry comes from the shapefile for that reason.
• A record has the precision it declares, not the precision it appears to have. A point drawn on good cartography asserts exactness even when the record says otherwise, and on a map what you see wins. That is why geographic precision is a mandatory field with its own source, and “municipal centroid” is a legitimate result said out loud.

07How to cite this atlas

The data is CC BY 4.0: free to reuse, commercially included, crediting the source. To cite the whole atlas:

Vázquez Paumard, A. D. — Atlas Estratégico de España (Strategic Atlas of Spain), release 2026.09.141 · 10.5281/zenodo.21918595 · atlas.eltercioviejo.com · data CC BY 4.0

That DOI is the concept one: it always resolves to the latest deposited edition, and each release also has its own. And it must be said what it answers for, because a DOI promises permanence: the Zenodo deposit archives the citation apparatus —archived sources, provenance, contract and changelog—, not the data layers, which are served from here and from the explorer.

To cite a single record, every record page carries a ready-made citation — the «Citar este registro» disclosure at the foot of the dossier; in the viewer, with a copy button — besides its own permanent link (the corner button copies it). Its identifier is stable forever: layer:record, e.g. nuclear:almaraz-i. Every downloaded layer carries its release and version inside.

Every fact in the atlas cites, in turn, the source that supports it, with the attribution formula each emitter demands — the exact reciprocal of what is asked here.

08Embedding the map

The map can be embedded anywhere with an iframe. The embedded view accepts the same parameters as the viewer — which layers are on, and the framing — so compose the view in the atlas, copy the address, and swap the root for /incrustar.html:

<iframe src="https://atlas.eltercioviejo.com/incrustar.html?capas=nuclear&v=5.5/40.0/-3.7" width="100%" height="480" style="border:1px solid #DAD7CC" title="Strategic Atlas of Spain" loading="lazy"></iframe>

Each layer's attribution travels inside the embedded map — the emitters' licences require it — and every record is clickable: it opens the full atlas in a new tab, with that record's file and sources unfolded (if the iframe carries the sandbox attribute, it needs allow-popups). The badge links back to the same view in the atlas. You can also download the current view as an image from the viewer itself (the button under the zoom controls): a PNG with the attribution burned in.

09On paper, or as PDF

The record sheets, the water and gas reports, the datasets, the stories, the library and the project dossier are made to be printed. There is no button: print with Ctrl+P (or ⌘P on a Mac) and choose «Save as PDF». Each of those pages says so at the foot.

It is not the dump a browser gives by default. The sheet inverts the ink —the site is dark and browsers do not print backgrounds, so without that it would come out blank—, navigation and buttons are dropped because on paper they are nothing, and what exists only there is added: the address of the page and the release its figures came from. A printed sheet has no address bar, and paper that does not say where it came from is exactly what this atlas does not publish.

That is why the PDF you get here stays citable: it says which edition it was and where to look again. A datum that changes tomorrow does not turn the paper into a lie — it leaves it dated, which is a different thing.

10Licences and cadence

The data is CC BY 4.0 — free reuse, commercial included, crediting the source. That choice forbids incorporating datasets with viral licences, and forces rebuilding from primary sources whatever cannot be used. The code is neither published nor licensed: it is personal work and all rights are reserved. What the public repository serves is the documentary archive —contract, changelog, provenance and archived sources—, which is what you need to verify a datum, not to rebuild the viewer. The data does not depend on that decision: it remains CC BY 4.0, and that is the half you can audit.

Every release has its entry in the changelog: what changed, why, and with what evidence — and what remains unknown, which is a mandatory section. A release that does not declare what it ignores is claiming to know everything. Every release is also announced via RSS, for whoever prefers the changes to come to them.

The atlas is the work of one person: it is curated and maintained by Arturo David Vázquez Paumard. The signature does not turn the record into opinion — every claim still hangs from its source, not from whoever writes it down.