Spanish surname rankings

The three rankings

The first sorts the thousand most widespread surnames by number of households; the second sorts the thousand most common surnames by the number of localities in which they appear, that is by geographical spread; the third collects the longest surnames, nearly all Basque and of toponymic origin. The first two measure different things: a surname can be very numerous but concentrated in a few provinces, or thin on the ground yet present everywhere.

Where the data come from

All the rankings come from the same body of more than fourteen million records, drawn from the telephone directories of the 1990s. They therefore do not include households without a telephone, nor any later changes. The details are on the information page.

How to use them

Every surname in the list is a link: opening it shows the map of its distribution across Spanish territory.