Every fuel station in Spain is legally required to report its prices to the Ministry for Ecological Transition, which then republishes them at no cost through the Geoportal de Gasolineras and its official mobile app, Ruta-e. For drivers who want to refuel for less without relying on ad-supported third-party apps, these two public tools are the most direct route to the source data — provided you understand what they do and, more importantly, what they do not.
- Legal backbone: Price reporting is mandated by Order ITC/2308/2007, which obliges stations to submit sale prices, supplied volumes, opening hours and coordinates.
- Two official channels: A browser-based Geoportal with historical series and bulk downloads, plus the free Ruta-e app for iOS and Android.
- Declared, not certified: The Ministry warns that published prices are informative only and reflect what each station operator has submitted.
- Known weak spots: Ruta-e has drawn user complaints about launch and login failures, and its privacy labelling conflicts with its own policy document.
Where the numbers on the map actually come from
The data pipeline starts with the stations themselves. Under Order ITC/2308/2007 of 25 July, every retailer — whether tied to a wholesale operator or independent — must send the Ministry its selling prices, the quantities supplied, its opening hours and the coordinates of the facility. The regulation was designed to bring transparency to retail petroleum sales and to give citizens better information about what they pay.
The fine print matters. The Ministry’s price history page states that the content is purely informative and does not constitute a price certification, and that the figures are exactly those submitted by each station’s owner. In practice, the Geoportal publishes what the station declares. If a station updates late, the map lags with it. The sensible workflow is to use the map to choose a destination and the pump to confirm the figure.
Getting the most out of the desktop Geoportal
The Geoportal is more than a map with prices pinned to it. It is available in eight languages, including Catalan, Galician and Basque, and its menu hides several features most drivers never touch.
The map and discount plans
The home view displays service stations with their prices and allows filtering by discount plans, a feature the portal highlights as a recent addition. A separate section lists discount schemes by operator, which is useful if you carry a brand loyalty card.
Price history: the undervalued tool
The historical section lets users query series by autonomous community, province, municipality or individual station, with daily, weekly, monthly or annual aggregation. Each day’s series takes the price in force at 23:59, while a per-station timeline shows the price valid at any given moment. Watching a single station over several weeks tells you far more about whether it is consistently cheap than a snapshot of today’s figure.
Bulk downloads
The portal also offers files for GPS devices, KML files, discount plan information, updated prices and SHAPE and CSV layers covering stations, maritime berths and charging points — a genuinely open-data resource for anyone building their own comparisons.
Ruta-e: the official app, strengths and caveats
Ruta-e is free and presented by the Ministry as the successor to the older GeoGasolineras application. It combines service station data with information from electric charging point operators and refreshes from the Geoportal. According to the Ministry, it allows filtering by location and search radius, by vehicle type (electric, hybrid or combustion), by fuel type (fossil or renewable), by connector type and by opening hours. Users can build a profile with their vehicles and favourite stations — the App Store listing adds price-change alerts for favourites — calculate a route and see stations or charging points along it, check services such as cafeterias, car washes or air, and report data errors.
Three caveats stand out as of November 2026. The first concerns privacy and consistency: the App Store label states the developer collects no data, yet the app’s own privacy policy explains that the registration form and location permission could involve processing names, national ID numbers, email addresses, phone numbers and location data. The two statements do not align. For pure price checking, the browser-based Geoportal avoids registration altogether; the app’s account is worth creating only when its features — such as favourite-station alerts — genuinely add value.
The second is reliability. App Store reviews include users reporting that the app fails to open or throws errors at sign-in. These are opinions rather than an audit, but they are worth knowing before you depend on it at the pump.
The third is identification. The App Store lists the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation as the provider rather than the Ministry for Ecological Transition, which confuses users trying to verify that the app is official. The safe route is to reach the store through the link on the MITECO website.
The euros-per-100-km poster, explained
Some stations display a table comparing the cost of each fuel per 100 kilometres travelled. It does not compare stations with one another; it compares energy types, and it is mandatory only at certain sites. The common methodology was set by Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2018/732, and the display obligation now sits in Regulation (EU) 2023/1804, which repealed the 2014 directive. The formula multiplies fuel price by a vehicle’s consumption per 100 km, using the previous quarter’s average price as a ceiling and consumption figures from models comparable in weight and power.
In Spain, Order TED/1286/2020 has required the table since 1 April 2021 at installations meeting at least one of two conditions: sales above 5 million litres of petrol and diesel in the previous calendar year, or dispensing at least one alternative fuel, excluding blended biofuels. The poster can be downloaded from the Ministry’s site in vertical or horizontal format.
The table is most useful for anyone considering a change of car, since it places petrol, diesel, electricity and gas on a single scale. For today’s refuelling decision, the map remains the tool that matters — and the Geoportal, for all its modest promotion, is one of the administration’s most useful public services. Its weakness is not the map but its dependence on timely declarations and on an app that still needs to fix its access errors and clarify exactly what data it requests.