El Periódico, La Nueva España and Prensa Ibérica Paywalls: How to Read Them for Free

El Periódico de Catalunya is Barcelona's second big daily, founded in 1978, published in Spanish and Catalan editions and traditionally the more popular, left-leaning counterpart to La Vanguardia. Since 2019 it has belonged to Prensa Ibérica, the group built by Javier Moll out of regional papers along Spain's northern and eastern coasts: La Nueva España in Oviedo, Levante-EMV in Valencia, Información in Alicante, Faro de Vigo, Diario de Mallorca and others. Each of these is the leading newspaper in its province, with a newsroom that covers the local council, courts, economy and festivals in a depth no national paper matches. They all share one subscription system and one paywall, so this guide covers the group together and explains how to read a full article from any of them.

How the Prensa Ibérica paywall works

Prensa Ibérica runs a freemium paywall with a meter on top. Breaking news and agency copy are open to everyone. Articles labelled as exclusive content for subscribers, which include interviews, long features, investigations and much of the best local reporting, are reserved for subscribers, 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.

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 Prensa Ibérica papers sit on the softer side of it, with one caveat we describe below.

Our tests on 20 October 2026 through Skip the Paywall:

• A 1,047-word El Periódico interview with Esther Garcia Capdevila, the director behind more than 3,000 fashion shows including the 080 Barcelona Fashion event, loaded in full, all 18 paragraphs, as did a 612-word Barcelona story on how influencers' social media posts help detect electricity fraud in restaurants, all 8 paragraphs.
• A 1,359-word La Nueva España feature on a working day with the barnacle gatherers of Cabo Peñas loaded in full, all 11 paragraphs, along with an 806-word report on Prado masterpieces presented at Oviedo's Teatro Filarmónica, all 11 paragraphs, and a 449-word 2022 piece on the Oviedo philharmonic society, all 6 paragraphs.
• A 966-word Levante-EMV story on the government blocking reclassification of flood-prone rural land loaded in full, all 10 paragraphs, as did an 884-word report on Social Services cancelling an 80-year-old woman's pension and demanding 26,942 euros back, all 13 paragraphs. A 360-word breaking story on a confinement order during the dana Adam storm is a short bulletin and came back whole, all 11 paragraphs.
• A 1,261-word Información report on the flooding at Els Poblets after the river Girona burst its banks loaded in full, all 37 paragraphs, and a 1,202-word analysis of Alicante's political fires, all 13 paragraphs.
• Two tests did not load in full. A 204-word El Periódico crime story from Sant Adrià and a 231-word Información story on a fire in an abandoned Benidorm nightclub each returned only the opening preview, and the reader said so rather than presenting them as complete.

In other words most Prensa Ibérica stories load in full, but an occasional one returns only the preview. When that happens the reader tells you, and trying again later sometimes helps because the preview appears to depend on how the particular page was published rather than on the subject.

Read an El Periódico or Prensa Ibérica article in full

• Copy the article link. El Periódico links look like elperiodico.com/es/barcelona/20261008/ followed by the headline slug and a nine-digit id. The regionals use a dated path on their own domains: lne.es/oviedo/2026/10/06/, levante-emv.com/comunitat-valenciana/2026/10/19/ or informacion.es/alicante/2026/09/20/, followed by the slug, the 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, or with a clear note if only the preview was available.

The reader shows the article in Spanish, or in Catalan if you pasted a link from El Periódico's Catalan edition, 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. El Periódico and each of the regionals send free email bulletins, including morning briefings and local editions, that summarise the day's stories and link to them.
• Library access. El Periódico, La Nueva España, Levante-EMV and Información are 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. The Generalitat de Catalunya, the Generalitat Valenciana and the Principality of Asturias all publish official statements, emergency notices and gazettes free, and much of the regionals' institutional reporting can be checked against them.

How it compares with other Spanish papers

El Periódico's city rival La Vanguardia loads in full, as does the Catalan-language Ara. The Madrid dailies behave differently from one another. 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

The Prensa Ibérica regionals are frequently the only newsroom that sends a reporter to the provincial council, the flood zone or the fishing port, and El Periódico sustains one of Barcelona's two big newsrooms. 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.