A Coruña is currently the eighth most populous municipality in Spain, but the city would rise several positions in the ranking if it joined its first metropolitan belt, constituting a “Supercoruña” of almost 400,000 inhabitants. A Coruña is the second smallest provincial capital municipality in Spain in extension, with only 37.83 square kilometres, just above Cádiz, and that means that its official population data practically only include the inhabitants of the city core.
In other cities, the population figure also includes the surrounding towns as they are within the same municipal area, but in the case of A Coruña its outskirts belong to other neighboring municipalities that are part of its metropolitan area, such as Arteixo, Culleredo or Oleiros. Towns that are attached to the city such as Meicende, Pastoriza, Vilaboa, Fonteculler, O Burgo or Perillo are not part of the Herculean council.
This consolidated A Coruña would add the 244,700 inhabitants of the Herculean capital -according to the data of the census as of January 1, 2022-, the 33,076 of Arteixo, the 24,505 of Cambre, the 30,790 of Culleredo and the 37,271 of Oleiros. The result would be 370,342 inhabitants, which would place it closing the “top ten” of Spanish cities, above Bilbao and Alicante, which are currently fighting to be the tenth. It would be below the ninth, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, which has 378,797 residents.
The resulting municipality would have 277.64 square kilometers and would be among the largest in Galicia in extension, exceeding the 220.01 of Santiago de Compostela, but below the 297.15 square kilometers of Lugo. Although it would be a very large municipality to be Galicia, it would be far from the 882 square kilometers of Murcia, the 395 of Malaga or the almost 974 square kilometers of Zaragoza.
The statistical “trap” of population rankings
A Coruña is not the only city in Spain with “unfair” treatment due to statistics, there are other cities that have a very small municipality and a much larger metropolitan area. In addition to Cádiz, which is practically an island, the most similar case to that of A Coruña is that of Bilbao. The Biscayan capital covers an area of 41.60 square kilometers, almost completely occupied by the 344,127 inhabitants, and the city continues along the entire estuary and the Nervión valley, encompassing several more municipalities. Its metropolitan area exceeds one million people.
Something similar happens to Barcelona, which It has on paper 1,636,193 inhabitants in its very dense municipality of 101.35 square kilometersbut the city continues towards Badalona, Santa Coloma de Gramanet to the northeast, and towards L’Hospitalet and the Llobregat valley to the southwest.
In the case of A Coruña, the tiny extension of its municipality means that it is in the ranking below cities with a much larger municipal term that allows them to cover part of their metropolitan area within their municipal limitssuch as Córdoba (with a municipality 33 times larger than A Coruña), Vitoria or even Gijón, Valladolid and Vigo.
The current ranking of the most populated municipalities in Spain, with its extension
CiudadPopulationExtension1.Madrid3.280.782604.452.Barcelona1.636.193101.353.Valencia792.492134.65 4.Seville681.998141.35.Zaragoza673.010973.786.Malaga579.076394.987.Murcia462.9 79881.86 8.Palma de Mallorca415. 940208.63 9.Las Palmas de Gran Canaria378.797100.55 10.Bilbao344.12741.60 11.Alicante338.577201,2712.Córdoba319.515125313.Valladolid295.639197.9114.Vigo292.37 4109.0615.Gijón267.706182.116 .Hospitalet de Llobregat265.44412.4017.Vitoria253.672276.0818.A Coruña244.70037.8319.Elche235.580326.07 20.Granada228.68288.02
A practically impossible union and a stopped metropolitan area
Although making these calculations is interesting and A Coruña imperialism is always a controversial subject, the truth is that a hypothetical union of these five municipalities is practically impossible. The five main councils of the Coruña metropolitan area have important differences in regulations, ordinances and taxation, apart from being governed by political forces of completely different colors. The PSOE only coincides in A Coruña and Culleredo, but with very different situations in the corporations.
A separate issue is the idea of officially establishing a metropolitan area of A Coruña that shares and optimizes services and costs, a project that from time to time it is rescued but it does not quite start up, contrary to what has happened in Vigo. This metropolitan area would cover the entire region of A Coruña, plus other nearby municipalities such as Betanzos or A Laracha, among other possible ones.
In recent years there have only been two mergers of municipalities in Galicia. The first, that of Oza dos Ríos with Cesuras, just a few kilometers from A Coruña and within its large metropolitan area. The second and most recent, that of Cerdedo with Cotobade. This union of Cerdedo-Cotobade has even altered the regional map of the community: although both municipalities were neighboring and bordering, one belonged to the Tabeirós-Terra de Montes region and the other to Pontevedra. No more unions of municipalities in Galicia have been put on the table.
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