infoLibre Paywall: How to Read infoLibre Articles for Free

infoLibre is a Madrid digital daily launched in 2013 by a group of journalists led by Jesús Maraña, modelled on the French investigative site Mediapart, which is a partner and shareholder and whose investigations infoLibre translates into Spanish. It is funded largely by its readers, who join as socios, and it has built a reputation for investigations into public contracts, party financing and the Madrid regional government, alongside a strong opinion section. The pieces that circulate most widely, the exclusives and the columns, are usually marked for socios, so a reader arriving from social media or a search result often meets a prompt to join. This guide explains how the paywall works and how to read a full article.

How the infoLibre paywall works

infoLibre runs a freemium paywall. Breaking news, agency copy and some of its own reporting are open to everyone. Investigations, the Mediapart translations and most columns are marked as content for socios and are reserved for paying members. There does not appear to be a monthly meter on the open articles, so the distinction is purely by piece.

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 socio and swaps the body for the membership 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 infoLibre sits on the softer side of it.

Our tests on 20 October 2026 through Skip the Paywall:

• A 1,587-word infoLibre investigation showing that the Madrid regional government awarded a contract without tender to a company owned by the director of its own orchestra, the ORCAM, for a show performed by that orchestra, loaded in full, all 22 paragraphs.
• A 1,841-word infoLibre translation of Mediapart's Dirty Payments investigation, linking a subsidiary of the French bank Société Générale to online scams, loaded in full, all 39 paragraphs.
• A 1,105-word infoLibre column from the Buzón de Voz series arguing that the left needs votes rather than culprits loaded in full, all 10 paragraphs.

Read an infoLibre article in full

• Copy the article link. infoLibre links look like infolibre.es/politica/ followed by the headline slug, an underscore, a short number, another underscore, a seven-digit id and .html. Opinion columns sit under infolibre.es/opinion/ and the Mediapart translations under infolibre.es/mediapart/.
• 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 infoLibre 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. infoLibre sends free email bulletins that summarise the day's stories and link to them, and its editor writes a regular letter to readers.
• Mediapart's own site. The investigations infoLibre translates were first published in French on Mediapart, which has its own membership paywall, so the original is no more open than the translation.
• Official records. infoLibre's contract investigations draw on the Spanish public procurement portal and the Madrid regional gazette, both published free, so the underlying documents can be checked directly.
• Related free sources. Court rulings from the CGPJ, congressional records and party accounts filed with the Tribunal de Cuentas are published free.

How it compares with other Spanish digital dailies

infoLibre's closest counterpart is elDiario.es, another reader-funded Madrid site with a socios model, which also loads in full, as does the larger El Español. Among the legacy 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, La Vanguardia and the Prensa Ibérica papers all pass. The full list of sites that work is kept current.

Subscribe if you read it regularly

infoLibre has no large media group behind it. Its investigations exist because a few thousand socios pay a modest monthly fee, and a site that depends on readers is more exposed to lost membership than one that depends on advertising. If you read its investigations and columns every week, becoming a socio is the right way to keep them coming.