Territorial nomenclature of census tract groups 2024

Idescat updates the territorial nomenclature of census tract groups for the year 2024. The nomenclature was created in-house for the production and dissemination of the Small Area Socioeconomic Index (IST), which has also been applied in the dissemination of other statistics including the Population and Housing Census and the Educational Attainment Statistics.

Census tract groups are territorial units with 9,000 inhabitants on average (between 5,000 and 20,000 inhabitants) made up of a set of whole contiguous census tracts with similar socioeconomic characteristics.

There are three types of census tract group:

• Inframunicipal. These are sectors or areas within municipalities with a population of more than 12,000 inhabitants.
• Municipal. These comprise a single municipality with a population of between 10,000 and 12,000 inhabitants.
• Supramunicipal. These are aggregations of whole municipalities within a county. As many census tract groups as necessary are established using municipalities of less than 10,000 inhabitants to create units of up to 20,000 inhabitants.

Of the 853 census tract groups currently defined for Catalonia, 713 are inframunicipal, 26 are municipal and 114 are supramunicipal. In the case of municipalities with more than 12,000 inhabitants, the census tract groups have a configuration similar to that of neighbourhoods, groups of neighbourhoods, sectors of neighbourhoods, districts or municipal sectors.

There are some variations in the Territorial Nomenclature of Census Tract Groups compared to previous versions in their correspondence with the municipalities and census tracts they group together:

• The creation of the county of El Lluçanès in mid-2023 has meant that the Osona West census tract group has become the Lluçanès census tract group. Furthermore, to maintain the criterion that census tract groups are infracounty units, five of the thirteen municipalities that were in the Osona West census tract group are no longer part of it and instead have been added to other nearby census tract groups:
• Sant Agustí de Lluçanès and Sant Boi de Lluçanès have been added to Osona North.
• Muntanyola and Santa Eulàlia de Riuprimer have been added to Osona Centre-South and South-East.
• Sant Bartomeu del Grau has been added to Osona Centre-North.

• The change of county designation of Biosca and Torà has meant that these two municipalities have been removed from the La Segarra census tract group and added to the El Solsonès census tract group.

In the website's section on Census tract groups, you can consult and download the territorial nomenclature for census tract groups (and the respective correlations with the census tracts that comprise them). Each census tract group's identifying code is comprised of nine digits, the composition of which is described in the methodology linked to the page.

The names of the census tract groups, which at the time of this publication are provisional, have been created based on the existing toponymy for counties, municipalities, districts and municipal sectors, in addition to other geographical descriptors that allow them to be located easily on a map.