How to find the SIGPAC code for your land in Spain
Updated: September 2026
SIGPAC is the Sistema de Información Geográfica de Parcelas Agrícolas: the official map Spain uses to identify every piece of land with an agricultural use. The Ministry of Agriculture and the regional governments keep it up to date. It is the reference used for CAP payments, and it is how your land has to be named in the cuaderno de explotación (farm notebook). If you own or farm land in Spain, this is the code you will be asked for again and again.
Why you are asked for a SIGPAC code
Since 1 January 2026, any record of a plant protection treatment has to identify the plot that was treated. In Spain the official way to do that is the recinto (SIGPAC enclosure). "The olive grove up the hill" is not an identifier. The recinto is. This applies whether or not you read Spanish and whether or not you live in the country: the obligation attaches to the land and to the person farming it, not to a nationality.
How to read a SIGPAC code
It is not one number. It is seven parts, running from large to small.
- Provincia and municipio: province and municipality. Where the land sits.
- Agregado and zona: internal administrative subdivisions of the municipality. In most places both are zero.
- Polígono and parcela: the holding as the rural cadastre knows it. This is the closest thing to a field number.
- Recinto: the piece inside that parcela with a single land use. A parcela with olives and a corner of grazing is two recintos.
The recinto is the unit that matters, because it is what carries a land use, a surface area and its own characteristics.
The SIGPAC land use code
Every recinto carries a two-letter use code. The ones you will meet most often: TA arable land, OV olive grove, VI vineyard, FY fruit trees, PS pasture, FO forest. That use decides which payments you can claim and what the administration expects to find growing there.
Next to the use, the recinto holds numbers worth knowing: the official surface area, the average slope, the irrigation coefficient and the area deemed eligible for CAP purposes. These are the figures the administration sees when it looks at your land, so they should be the same figures you work with.
SIGPAC and the cadastre are not the same thing
This is the most common confusion, and it costs people money. The catastro (cadastre) says who owns the land and what it is worth for tax. Its identifier is the twenty-character referencia catastral (cadastral reference), the one printed on your IBI bill, the annual local property tax. SIGPAC says what is grown on the land and over how much agricultural surface. The same field has both codes, and the two surfaces often disagree, because they measure different things. Neither is wrong. They answer different questions, and you will need both.
Getting your code without fighting the official viewer
The official route is the SIGPAC viewer run by the Ministry, or the one your comunidad autónoma (autonomous region) runs. You search by province, municipality, polígono and parcela, then zoom in until you land on the right recinto. It works, in Spanish, with no English interface, but it assumes you already know the polígono and parcela numbers. Most owners do not have them to hand, especially when the land was inherited or bought through an agent.
Agro GPS does it the other way round. You type the referencia catastral from your IBI bill, or simply tap your field on the map, and the recinto, the land use and the SIGPAC surface fill themselves in. From then on, every job you log is tied to that recinto in the exact format the digital farm notebook expects.
What to do once you have the code
- Put it on every treatment record, not only the first one of the season.
- Check the use code matches what you actually grow. If it says PS and you planted almonds, fix it before the CAP application, not after.
- Use the SIGPAC surface, not your own measurement, for anything you send to the administration.
- If one parcela holds two crops, expect two recintos and record them separately.
- Write the code down somewhere you will find it again. Your adviser will ask for it every year.