CITY life: Convenient and exciting, or busy and stressful, with great shopping and entertainment on the doorstep and excellent transport links, or noisy and polluted and full of traffic jams. For some people, their worst nightmare, but others would say they couldn't bear to live anywhere else and would be bored stiff in a peaceful, rural environment.
Some cities look like this (photo: Pexels)
But the term 'city' is relative. The standard definition is based upon inhabitant numbers – typically upwards of 100,000 or 250,000 – and, in Spain, a provincial capital is automatically a city.
….but others look like this. Here's your first view of Spain's smallest city (photo: Mario Modesto Mata/Wikimedia Commons)
In some cases, the provincial capital is not, in fact, the largest municipality in terms of resident numbers – Asturias' capital is Oviedo, and its biggest municipality is Gijón; the capitals of the provinces of Cádiz and of Pontevedra, of the same names, are smaller in population than Jerez de la Frontera, in the former, and Vigo, in the latter.
Some very small cities in Spain
And some provincial capital cities are barely the size of a small market town. Teruel – the southernmost province of the land-locked north-eastern region of Aragón – has just 36,240 inhabitants in its capital of the same name, although this makes it far and away a booming metropolis. Of its 236 municipalities, nearly 40% have 100 or fewer residents (16% have 50 or fewer), more than 62% have 200 or fewer residents, and barely 8% of them have 1,000 or more inhabitants.
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com