Diario de Cádiz and Diario de Sevilla Paywalls: How to Read Grupo Joly Papers for Free

Diario de Cádiz was founded on 16 June 1867 by Federico Joly Velasco, and the Joly family of Cádiz still owns it. The paper grew into Grupo Joly, the family-owned Andalusian newspaper group that now publishes eight dailies across the region: Diario de Cádiz, Diario de Sevilla, Diario de Jerez, Europa Sur in Algeciras, El Día de Córdoba, Huelva Información, Granada Hoy and Málaga Hoy. Diario de Cádiz sells about 7,900 print copies a day (2024), but far more people read the group online, and that is where they meet the subscription prompt: the opinion columns and the longer local features are the pieces most often reserved for subscribers. This guide explains how the Grupo Joly paywall works and how to read a full article from Diario de Cádiz or Diario de Sevilla.

How the Grupo Joly paywall works

All eight Joly sites share one platform and one paywall system, supplied by the French vendor Poool. The group's own page script draws a line between two modes. Ordinary stories sit behind a dynamic paywall, a meter that lets a non-subscriber open a number of articles before a prompt appears. Pieces marked premium sit behind a hard paywall and are for subscribers only, whatever your count. Premium pages declare themselves not free to read in their structured data, which is how search engines know to treat them differently.

What matters for a reader is where the gate is enforced. In both modes the article text is delivered in the page, and the script then decides whether to show it or to hide it behind the subscription box. A reader that fetches the page without running that script receives the complete article, premium or not. Our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls sets out why that distinction matters, and despite the "hard paywall" label in its own code, Grupo Joly sits on the softer side of it.

Our tests on 29 October 2026 through Skip the Paywall:

• A 512-word Diario de Cádiz El Puerto report on the Venta La Rufana restaurant closing for good on 10 January loaded in full, all 8 paragraphs.
• A 512-word Diario de Cádiz Andalucía report on experts saying all three safety systems on the Madrid-Seville line failed before the fatal train crash loaded in full, all 8 paragraphs.
• A 998-word Diario de Cádiz feature on invasive algae, fertilisers and the hidden value of waste loaded in full, all 14 paragraphs.
• A 331-word Diario de Cádiz opinion column, "El choque", flagged by the paper as subscriber-only, loaded in full, all 4 paragraphs.
• A 403-word Diario de Cádiz opinion column, "Puente, desastre sin paliativos", also flagged subscriber-only, loaded in full, all 3 paragraphs.
• A 494-word Diario de Sevilla report on the same three failed safety systems loaded in full, all 8 paragraphs.
• An 819-word Diario de Sevilla feature on the "still open" wounds of Adamuz after the crash, flagged subscriber-only, loaded in full, all 8 paragraphs.

The columns are short in the original, so those counts are the whole piece, not a cut-off extract. Three of the seven articles were marked subscriber-only by the paper itself, and all three came through complete.

Read a Diario de Cádiz or Diario de Sevilla article in full

• Copy the article link. Diario de Cádiz links look like diariodecadiz.es/ followed by a section, the headline and _0_ plus a number, ending in .html, and Diario de Sevilla links follow the same pattern on diariodesevilla.es. Opinion columns sit under /opinion/articulos/.
• 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.

Only Diario de Cádiz and Diario de Sevilla were tested, so they are the two titles tagged as supported. The other six Joly papers share the same platform and the same paywall script, so they should behave the same way, but they will not be tagged until they have been tested.

Other approaches

• The meter. Ordinary stories on the Joly sites are metered rather than closed, so as far as we can tell a private window resets the count on those, though pieces marked premium stay closed.
• Library access. Many Spanish public libraries offer digital press services to cardholders. Whether a given service carries the Joly titles varies, so it is worth checking with your library.
• Related free sources. Much of the group's regional reporting draws on public material: statements from the Junta de Andalucía, court documents and official investigation findings are published free, and the facts in a paywalled story can often be checked against them.
• Print. Diario de Cádiz still sells a daily print edition, about 7,900 copies a day in 2024, so the paper itself remains an option in the province.

How it compares with other Spanish papers

Grupo Joly is one of several Spanish regional groups whose sites deliver the full text in the page and hide it with a script. Vocento's regionals, led by ABC, El Correo and El Diario Vasco, behave the same way and work (our Vocento guide), as do Prensa Ibérica's titles such as El Periódico, La Nueva España and Levante (our Prensa Ibérica guide). Among the national papers, El Mundo works, but El País does not: elpais.com blocks the reader, so there is no El País guide. The full list of sites that work is kept current.

Subscribe if you read it regularly

Grupo Joly runs eight local newsrooms across Andalusia, and local reporting of that kind is expensive to keep going. If you read Diario de Cádiz or Diario de Sevilla every week, the right way to support it is a digital subscription to each title, with current prices on the papers' own subscription pages.