July 5, 2026
SOAP opera, but make it cadastral
Spain's cadastre API is SOAP from 2003, so I built a JSON wrapper (+MCP)
Spain’s property database was stuck in the past, and the comments came for blood
TLDR: A developer built a modern wrapper for Spain’s official property records because the government’s own access method still feels stuck in 2003. Commenters turned it into a roast, joking about “nightmares” and arguing the real scandal is that this may have been avoidable all along.
The big plot twist here isn’t just that someone built a cleaner front door for Spain’s official property database — it’s that the community instantly turned the old system into the villain of the week. The creator of Predio is pitching a simple idea: Spain’s public land and building records are useful, but the official way to access them feels like a time capsule. Instead of wrestling with dusty old machine-to-machine formats from the early 2000s, users get neat, predictable answers in plain modern data format, plus tools aimed at AI assistants and property apps.
And wow, the comments were not feeling nostalgic. One user laid out the mess in almost horror-story form: different services depending on how you search, different response shapes, and errors hidden inside “successful” responses. Another jumped in with the kind of line that says everything: “I still get nightmares from SOAP…” Suddenly this wasn’t just a product launch — it became a group therapy session for developers traumatized by ancient government tech.
The tiny spark of debate came from a commenter pointing out that systems like this often could have offered a simpler option all along, suggesting the painful old setup may have been less “impossible legacy problem” and more “nobody bothered to flip the obvious switch.” That’s where the drama landed: is this heroic cleanup work, or an indictment of how absurdly hard public data still is to use? Either way, the crowd’s verdict was brutal, amused, and painfully relatable.
Key Points
- •Predio offers a machine-friendly JSON wrapper for Spain’s cadastral data, which the article says is otherwise difficult to consume through the official SOAP/XML system.
- •The API accepts three query methods—cadastral reference, coordinates, and address—and returns a normalized output for both urban and rural properties.
- •The service is available through both a versioned REST API and an MCP server, with OpenAPI and llms.txt published on the same domain.
- •Predio says it uses JSON error responses, does not charge for business errors, and can return cached data marked `stale` if the official source is unavailable.
- •The article also promotes ParcelGuard, an early-access parcel due-diligence product, and describes prepaid pricing with 1 credit per successful response and a free tier of 250 credits per month.