Ara Paywall: How to Read Ara Articles for Free
Ara, the Catalan-language daily from Barcelona, keeps its reporting and columns for subscribers. How the ara.cat paywall works and how to read a full article.
Paywall behaviour last tested
Ara is the Catalan-language daily of Barcelona, founded in 2010 by a group of journalists and investors who set out to build a modern paper in Catalan from scratch, in print and online at once. It has become the reference daily for Catalan politics, culture and language policy, with a Balearic edition, Ara Balears, and a Spanish-language edition of its site for readers outside Catalonia. Its opinion pages carry many of the writers who shape debate in Catalonia, and its political reporting from Barcelona and Madrid is widely cited. Those are the pieces most often reserved for subscribers, so a reader arriving from social media or a search result frequently meets the subscription prompt. This guide explains how the paywall works and how to read a full article.
How the Ara paywall works
Ara runs a freemium paywall with a meter on top. Breaking news and agency copy are open. Analysis, interviews, columns and most of its own political reporting are marked for subscribers, and as far as we can tell non-subscribers also hit a monthly limit on the number of articles they can open before a prompt appears. The count is stored in a browser cookie.
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 Ara sits on the softer side of it.
Our tests on 20 October 2026 through Skip the Paywall:
- An 848-word Ara opinion column on vultures, evictions and opportunists in Catalan politics loaded in full, all 6 paragraphs.
- A 729-word Ara political report from Madrid on Alberto Núñez Feijóo's plan to end Catalan-language immersion in schools loaded in full, all 7 paragraphs.
- A 311-word Ara guest column on the right to healthy, fair and sustainable food, a short piece, came back whole but as a single block of text rather than separate paragraphs.
Read an Ara article in full
- Copy the article link. Ara links look like ara.cat/politica/ or ara.cat/opinio/ followed by the headline slug, an underscore, a short number, another underscore, a seven-digit id and .html.
- 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 Catalan, exactly as Ara published it, or in Spanish if you pasted a link from the Spanish-language edition. If you want it in English, your browser's built-in translation works on the reader page in the normal way, and it handles Catalan as well as it handles Spanish.
Other approaches
- Newsletters. Ara sends free email bulletins, including a morning briefing and section newsletters, that summarise the day's stories and link to them.
- Library access. Ara is carried on PressReader, which many public libraries in Spain, the UK and North America offer free to cardholders, and the print replica is also 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. The Generalitat de Catalunya and the Parliament of Catalonia publish statements, debates and official records free, and much of Ara's political reporting can be checked against them.
How it compares with other Catalan and Spanish papers
Barcelona's other two big dailies both load in full: La Vanguardia, the city's largest paper, and El Periódico, which like Ara publishes a Catalan edition. Among the Madrid papers, 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. El Mundo, ABC and the Vocento regionals, El Español, elDiario.es and infoLibre all pass. The full list of sites that work is kept current.
Subscribe if you read it regularly
Ara is a young paper in a minority language, and it depends on subscribers to a greater degree than the big Spanish-language dailies. If you read its columns and political coverage every week, a digital subscription, usually discounted for the first year, is the right way to keep Catalan-language journalism going.
Try it with an article
Paste the URL of an article from Ara and read it in a clean reader view. Free, instant, no signup.
Frequently asked questions
What language does the reader show Ara in?
Catalan, exactly as Ara publishes it, unless you paste a link from the Spanish-language edition of ara.cat. Your browser can translate the reader page into English or Spanish in the normal way.
Does the reader work on subscriber-only Ara articles?
Yes. All three articles in our 20 October 2026 tests loaded whole, including an 848-word column and a 729-word political report, though one short column came back as a single block of text. The text is carried in the page and hidden by a script, which the reader does not run.
Does it work on El País too?
No. El País blocked every request in our 17 October 2026 tests, so it is not on the list of supported sites. Ara, La Vanguardia, El Periódico, El Mundo and ABC all passed.