El Espectador Paywall: How to Read El Espectador Articles for Free
El Espectador, Colombia's oldest newspaper, meters its site and padlocks some pieces for subscribers. How the Piano paywall works and how to read a full story.
Paywall behaviour last tested
El Espectador is Colombia's oldest newspaper. It was founded on 22 March 1887 in Medellín by Fidel Cano and is now based in Bogotá, where it is part of the Valorem group. Its history is bound up with the country's: its editor Guillermo Cano was murdered in 1986 and its offices were bombed by the Medellín cartel in 1989, and the paper is still known for investigative reporting on politics, the armed conflict and corruption, as well as for its columnists and its culture supplement, El Magazín Cultural. The pieces that travel furthest, the political exclusives, the long interviews and the columns, are often the ones marked with a padlock, so a reader arriving from WhatsApp 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 El Espectador paywall works
El Espectador runs a metered paywall with a subscriber-only tier. It introduced its digital subscription in 2018 and at first applied the gate only to readers who opened more than 21 pieces a month. Today the site still counts how many articles a visitor opens, and on top of that some articles are marked with a padlock and reserved for subscribers from the first visit. A third-party listing puts the basic digital plan at roughly COP 19,900 a month, though prices change and the paper runs frequent promotions.
The gate is built on Piano, the subscription platform used by many newspapers, and is enforced in the browser. Article pages declare themselves as not free to read (isAccessibleForFree: false) while still carrying the complete text so that search engines can index it. A script then checks whether you are logged in or over your allowance and swaps the body for the subscription box. A reader that fetches the page without running that script receives the whole article. Our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls sets out why that distinction matters.
Our tests on 24 October 2026 through Skip the Paywall:
- A 1,847-word El Espectador Magazín Cultural investigation into the Instituto Caro y Cuervo under its current director, with staff complaints and research projects at risk, loaded in full, all 32 paragraphs.
- A 1,713-word El Espectador interview with the Palestinian director Annemarie Jacir about her film Palestina 36 and its arrival in Colombia loaded in full, all 28 paragraphs.
- A 727-word El Espectador politics report on Alejandro Ordóñez taking over from Lara to mediate with a Congress asking for more dialogue loaded in full, all 15 paragraphs.
A fourth test, a 1,264-word opinion column about the Instituto Tobías Emanuel in Cali, also came through in all 15 paragraphs.
Read an El Espectador article in full
- Copy the article link. El Espectador links look like elespectador.com/politica/ or elespectador.com/el-magazin-cultural/ followed by the headline in lower case, and columns sit under elespectador.com/opinion/columnistas/. Tracking tags such as ?utm_source=social on links shared from WhatsApp can stay, the reader ignores them.
- 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 El Espectador 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. El Espectador sends free email bulletins, including a morning briefing and section newsletters, that summarise the day's stories and link to them.
- Audio. Many articles carry a listen button with a generated audio version of the text, which is a quick way to take in a long piece.
- Private windows. The meter lives in a cookie, so a private window resets the count, though padlocked pieces stay closed.
- Official sources. Congressional records, Constitutional Court rulings and the Procuraduría's statements are published free, and much of the paper's political reporting can be checked against them.
How it compares with other Latin American papers
El Espectador's Bogotá rival El Tiempo also works through the reader, as do Clarín in Buenos Aires and La Tercera in Santiago. All three use the same pattern of a meter enforced by a script over text that is already in the page. The full list of sites that work is kept current.
Subscribe if you read it regularly
El Espectador has paid a higher price for its journalism than almost any newspaper in the world, and it still funds investigations that take months. If you read its columns and reporting every week, a digital subscription, which is often discounted for the first few months, is the right way to keep that work going.
Try it with an article
Paste the URL of an article from El Espectador and read it in a clean reader view. Free, instant, no signup.
Frequently asked questions
Who owns El Espectador?
The Valorem group, based in Bogotá. The paper was founded in Medellín in 1887 by Fidel Cano and has been published from Bogotá for most of its history.
Does the reader work on padlocked subscriber-only articles?
In our 24 October 2026 tests all four articles loaded in full, including a 1,847-word investigation and a 1,713-word interview from El Magazín Cultural. The site uses the Piano paywall enforced by a script in the browser, and the full text is present in the page.
How much does an El Espectador subscription cost?
A third-party listing puts the basic digital plan at roughly COP 19,900 a month, but prices change and the paper runs frequent promotions, so check the subscription page on elespectador.com for the current offer.