ABC, El Correo and El Diario Vasco Paywalls: How to Read Vocento Papers for Free

ABC is the oldest of Madrid's national dailies, founded in 1903 and still the paper of record for Spain's conservative and monarchist readership, with a famous opinion page and the Sunday magazine XL Semanal. It belongs to Vocento, the group formed in 2001 when the Prensa Española company behind ABC merged with Grupo Correo, the Bilbao publisher of El Correo. That merger is why ABC shares its subscription system with a string of strong regional papers: El Correo in Bilbao, El Diario Vasco in San Sebastián and El Diario Montañés in Santander, each the dominant daily in its province. All four put their best columns, interviews and local exclusives behind the same subscriber gate, so this guide covers the group as a whole and explains how to read a full article from any of them.

How the Vocento paywall works

ABC and the Vocento regionals run a freemium paywall with a meter on top. Agency copy and breaking news are open. Columns, interviews, investigations and much of the local reporting that the regionals are known for carry a subscriber-only label, and as far as we can tell non-subscribers also hit a monthly limit on open articles before a prompt appears. The count is stored in a browser cookie, and the same account works across the whole group.

The gate is enforced in the browser. The article text is delivered in the page so that search engines can index it, and a script then checks whether you are a subscriber or over your limit and swaps the body for the subscription box. A reader that fetches the page without running that script receives the complete article. Our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls sets out why that distinction matters, and the Vocento papers sit on the softer side of it.

Our tests on 20 October 2026 through Skip the Paywall:

• A 2,000-word ABC interview with the political philosopher Jahel Queralt, arguing that the left struggles to accept that genetics as well as class creates inequality, loaded in full, all 47 paragraphs.
• A 1,063-word ABC column by Juan Manuel de Prada, a satirical appeal to far-right voters to back Pedro Sánchez, loaded in full, all 5 paragraphs. A 378-word column on the housing agreement, a short opinion piece, also came back whole in its 2 paragraphs.
• A 664-word El Correo story on ten days of IT paralysis at the Ertzaintza, the Basque police, loaded in full, all 9 paragraphs. Two short local news stories, a 481-word report on repeat offenders arrested in Barakaldo and a 440-word report on a violent cash machine robbery in Urduliz, also came back whole, with 8 and 6 paragraphs respectively.
• A 1,234-word El Diario Vasco first-person account of a landlord trying to recover her own flat loaded in full, all 16 paragraphs, as did a 444-word story on the Saretxe housing union and an eviction in Egia, all 7 paragraphs. A 293-word tribute piece about a Mikel Laboa song played at a memorial is a short item and came back whole, all 6 paragraphs.
• A 961-word El Diario Montañés economics piece on the rise in unjustified dismissals since the labour reform loaded in full, all 14 paragraphs, along with a 614-word story on the Valle Real shopping centre expansion, all 12 paragraphs, and a 495-word Torrelavega report on a former industrial site, all 12 paragraphs.

Read an ABC or Vocento regional article in full

• Copy the article link. ABC links look like abc.es/opinion/ or abc.es/sociedad/ followed by the headline slug, a fourteen-digit date and time stamp and -nt.html. El Correo, El Diario Vasco and El Diario Montañés use the same slug-date-nt.html pattern on elcorreo.com, diariovasco.com and eldiariomontanes.es, occasionally ending -ntrc.html instead.
• Paste it into the box on the home page and press Read Article.
• The story appears in a clean reader view with the headline, byline and full text.

The reader shows the article in Spanish, exactly as the paper published it. If you want it in English, your browser's built-in translation works on the reader page in the normal way.

Other approaches

• Newsletters. ABC and the regionals each send free email bulletins, including morning briefings and local editions, that summarise the day's stories and link to them.
• Library access. ABC, El Correo, El Diario Vasco and El Diario Montañés are all carried on PressReader, which many public libraries in Spain, the UK and North America offer free to cardholders, and the print replicas are available through Kiosko y Más.
• Private windows. The monthly meter lives in a cookie, so a private window resets it, though subscriber-only pieces stay closed.
• Related free sources. Basque and Cantabrian regional government statements, Ertzaintza press releases and municipal records are published free, and much of the regionals' local reporting can be checked against them.

How it compares with other Spanish papers

The Vocento titles behave much like their Madrid rival El Mundo, which also loads in full. El País does not work: elpais.com blocked every request in our 17 October 2026 tests, so there is no El País guide, and the business paper Expansión returned short previews and is not listed. The other Spanish groups we have tested pass as well: La Vanguardia in Barcelona, the Prensa Ibérica regionals led by El Periódico, the digital dailies El Español, elDiario.es and infoLibre, and the Catalan-language Ara. The full list of sites that work is kept current.

Subscribe if you read it regularly

The Vocento regionals are often the only newsroom covering their city's council, courts and police in depth, and ABC funds a large Madrid newsroom and a famous stable of columnists. If you read one of them every day, a digital subscription, usually discounted for the first year, is the right way to keep that reporting going.