Madrid is divided into two administrative layers. The city is split into 21 distritos (districts), each governed by a junta municipal de distrito with its own office and budget. Each district is then subdivided into barrios (neighbourhoods) — 131 of them in total — which are smaller statistical and administrative units with no government of their own.
What exactly is a distrito?
A distrito is a formal unit of Madrid City Council, with a numbered code, a defined boundary, and a junta municipal — a district office headed by a concejal-presidente (a councillor appointed by the mayor) — that handles local services such as sports centres, libraries, parks maintenance and licensing. Madrid has had 21 districts since a boundary reform completed in 1988, replacing an older and less consistent set of divisions.
The districts vary enormously in size and population. Some, like Centro, are small in area but dense; others, like Fuencarral-El Pardo or Moncloa-Aravaca, cover huge tracts of parkland and campus and have far fewer residents per square kilometre. The Moncloa-Aravaca district is a useful example: it is one of the largest districts by area because it absorbs the Casa de Campo, the Ciudad Universitaria and open land toward the Sierra, yet its resident population is modest compared with denser southern districts.
What is a barrio, and how is it different from a distrito?
A barrio is a smaller subdivision inside a district, used mainly for census, statistical and postal-adjacent purposes. Barrios have official names and boundaries recorded by the city council, but they have no separate government, budget or elected representative of their own.
Each of the 21 districts contains between four and eight barrios, adding up to 131 across the city. A barrio’s boundary is a line on a municipal map used for population counts, health-centre catchments and school zoning — not a body that makes decisions. That distinction matters because most of the neighbourhood names visitors and residents actually use day to day are barrio names, not district names, and the two sets of boundaries do not always line up with the informal geography people describe.
Do the district and barrio maps match the neighbourhood names people actually use?
Often only loosely. Several of Madrid’s best-known colloquial neighbourhood names correspond to only part of an official barrio, or sit across a boundary between two of them, rather than matching a single administrative unit exactly.
The Centro district (distrito 01) is the clearest illustration. It has just six official barrios — Palacio, Embajadores, Cortes, Justicia, Universidad and Sol — yet those six names cover most of the areas Madrid is famous for, under entirely different popular labels. Malasaña is the everyday name for most of the Universidad barrio. Chueca sits within Justicia. Lavapiés is the popular name for the Embajadores barrio. And the older, tourist-facing labels for the streets around the Palacio Real and Plaza Mayor, often grouped as La Latina, correspond largely to the Palacio barrio, even though the barrio’s official name has no relation to the Latina district further south and west, which is a separate, much larger district entirely.
That last point causes genuine confusion, because it is a case of the same word meaning two different things on the map: “La Latina” as a place people visit is inside Centro, while “Latina” as an administrative district is a different, larger area to the southwest with its own set of barrios.
Why do some district names repeat, like the two Vallecas districts?
Madrid has two separate districts that both use the name Vallecas: Puente de Vallecas and Villa de Vallecas. They are adjacent, share a historical identity as a working-class area annexed to the city in the twentieth century, but function as two distinct administrative units with separate junta offices, boundaries and barrio lists. The Vallecas district explainer sets out how that split arose and what distinguishes the two areas today.
This kind of overlap — a shared historical name across formally separate units — is not unique to Vallecas, but it is the most visible example, and it is a useful reminder that a colloquial “district” in conversation and an official distrito on the council’s map are not always the same thing.
How does the division actually affect residents?
For anyone living in Madrid, the district and barrio you fall into determines a specific, checkable set of things: which junta municipal handles local permits and complaints, which public health centre and state school catchment applies, where the nearest council-run library or sports centre sits, and how your address is coded for the municipal census, the padrón.
Registering on the padrón at the correct address is what links a resident to their assigned district and barrio in the council’s records, and it is the record used for things like access to local public schools and some social services. The council’s own district offices are the point of contact for padrón registration, not a private agency.
Barrio identity also shapes services more informally — market halls, health centres and civic centres are typically named after and sited within a specific barrio — but the barrio itself issues nothing and administers nothing directly.
How are districts numbered on the map?
Each of the 21 districts carries an official two-digit code, from 01 to 21, used throughout the council’s statistical publications, and each barrio inside a district carries its own numeric code beneath that. The numbering broadly runs outward from the historic centre, though it is not a strict spiral and follows the order set in the 1988 reform rather than any geographic rule a visitor could guess from a map alone.
Postal codes in Madrid loosely track this geography but are a separate system run by the Spanish postal service, Correos, and do not map one-to-one onto district or barrio boundaries. Two addresses in the same barrio can occasionally carry different postal codes, and the reverse also happens.
What are the 21 districts, in outline?
The current list, unchanged since 1988, is:
- Centro
- Arganzuela
- Retiro
- Salamanca
- Chamartín
- Tetuán
- Chamberí
- Fuencarral-El Pardo
- Moncloa-Aravaca
- Latina
- Carabanchel
- Usera
- Puente de Vallecas
- Moratalaz
- Ciudad Lineal
- Hortaleza
- Villaverde
- Villa de Vallecas
- Vicálvaro
- San Blas-Canillejas
- Barajas
Some of these correspond closely to the identity most residents would give if asked where they live — Carabanchel and Vallecas are both strong, self-recognised identities that match their district boundaries reasonably well. Others, like Centro, are administrative umbrellas over several much more famous barrio-level identities, as set out above.
Where can the official boundaries be checked?
Madrid City Council publishes the current district and barrio boundaries, codes and population statistics through its open data portal, and general information about each junta municipal through its own website, madrid.es. Both are the authoritative source for anything that changes — population counts, precise boundary lines, or which barrio a given street sits in — and are worth checking directly rather than relying on older secondary maps, since barrio-level boundaries have occasionally been adjusted since 1988 even though the 21-district structure itself has not.
For a broader sense of how these districts and barrios read on the ground, the Neighbourhoods archive on this site works through them individually, covering how each one developed, what defines it now, and how its administrative identity relates to the name most people actually use for it.
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