Guillermo Rodríguez-López, Ignacio Cazcarro, Ana Serrano, Miguel Martín-Retortillo 2025-03-07
HISTORECO: Historical Spanish transition database on climate, geography, and economics of the 20th-21st Century
Guillermo Rodríguez-López, Ana Serrano, Miguel Martín-Retortillo, Ignacio Cazcarro (corresponding author: icazcarr@unizar.es)
HISTORECO is a comprehensive database that includes 45 geographic, climatic, hydrological, demographic, and economic variables (64 independent columns apart from the 7 first of identification of the municipality in "Historeco.csv") spanning the 20th and 21st centuries, covering 8,122 homogeneous municipalities in Spain each of which has one value per decade. It is a unique dataset that integrates data from various sources, facilitating the analysis of long-term temporal and spatial trends across multiple disciplines such as climate, geography, and socio-economic development.
The dataset combines information from twenty sources, harmonizing and downscaling them to the municipal level using GIS and programming tools (mainly QGIS, R, and Python). This is the most extensive dataset of its kind in terms of temporal depth and spatial granularity available for Spain. Further visualization and download options exist at https://historeco.unizar.es/.
This project has been developed thanks to funding from the Ramón Areces Foundation, without which it would not have been possible.
The database is provided in two main formats:
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Panel Data (CSV):
- One observation per municipality and decade.
- 7 initial identification columns (e.g., NUTS codes, municipality names) followed by the set of variables.
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Spatial Data (Shapefile):
- A spatial representation of the municipalities with an associated attribute table containing one column per variable and decade. The shapefile comprises 8,205 objects/polygons given that it also includes 87 objects of communal forests (mainly in Navarre, with the “facerías” regime, Basque Country, Castile and Leon, Cantabria and one case in Castile-La Mancha and another in Asturias).
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Atribute table format: An archive with the same structure as the attribute table, one row per municipality and one column per variable and decade, but with no spatial representation (Historeco_wide.csv).
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Municipalities spatial base: A shapefile with the Spanish municipalities is also included in case you want to use it and join it with the file Historeco_wide.csv in an autonomous way.This shapefile comes from the National Geographic Institute (IGN, https://centrodedescargas.cnig.es/CentroDescargas/catalogo.do).
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Yearly Panel Data (CSV) "Historeco_Year.csv": A more exploratory (in progress) database where yearly data is provided since 1950 for several climatic, land use, hydrological and geographic variables.
The database contains 45 variables divided into five thematic groups:
- Climatic Variables (e.g., total precipitation, mean temperature, frost days).
- Geographical Variables (e.g., distance to the coast, altitude, area, ruggedness).
- Land Use Variables (e.g., dryland surface, irrigated area, pastures, total crop area).
- Hydrological Variables (e.g., river basin, reservoir volume, distance to watercourses).
- Socio-economic Variables (e.g., population, urban/rural classification, distance to large municipalities).
The CSV file is structured with one observation per municipality and decade, enabling longitudinal analysis across multiple variables. It includes demographic, geographic, climatic, and socio-economic data, making it suitable for various fields of research.
The Shapefile includes the municipal polygons, allowing for direct use in GIS applications. Researchers can use this format to create maps, perform spatial analyses, and combine the data with other spatial datasets.
The data were derived using a variety of statistical and GIS techniques, tailored to homogenize and rescale the original data from various primary sources Full details of the methodological process for each thematic group are available in the methods folder.
If you use this database in your research, please cite the following paper:
Rodríguez-López, G., Serrano, A., Martín-Retortillo, M. & Cazcarro, I.(2025). HISTORECO: Historical Spanish Transition Database on Climate, Geography, and Economics of the 20th-21st Century. Accepted in Scientific Data.
This dataset is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). You are free to share and adapt the material as long as you provide appropriate credit.
For any questions regarding the database or issues using it, please contact the corresponding author Ignacio Cazcarro at icazcarr@unizar.es.