I build and write BestBarrio. It is a personal project: there is no estate agency behind it, no investors and nobody paid to show you a particular flat.
Why I started
The idea came from hearing the same conversation again and again. People searching for a flat in Madrid ended up looking only in the three neighborhoods they already knew, paying more than they could afford or spending an hour getting to work, while areas twenty minutes away never entered the search.
And people arriving from abroad, who did not know the city, had to choose where to live from a map, two forum recommendations and neighborhood reputations that in Madrid are often twenty years out of date.
The data to do better exists and is public: what people pay in rent in each area, official transport timetables, what is within a walk of each street. What was missing was putting it together around one person's real week. That is what I am trying to do here.
What I am, and what I am not
I am not an estate agent or an urban planner, and I will not pretend to be one. What I do is build the tool, process the data and write the area guides.
That is exactly why there are no opinions about prices pulled out of thin air. Every rent figure comes from Spain's Ministry of Housing, every journey from the official timetables of Madrid's transport authority and Renfe, and every nearby service from OpenStreetMap. The methodology is public so anyone can check it and tell me when something looks wrong.
How each page is checked
- Figures are never typed by hand. A script reads the official files and freezes each number with its source and year. If the text claims something the data does not support, the tests fail and the page is not published.
- Every page says when it was reviewed. The publication date never changes; the update date does, whenever the content changes or new data arrives.
- Unknowns are stated. When an area has too few registered contracts, its page says so instead of showing an unreliable number.
- No money involved. There are no property adverts or commissions. If that ever changes, it will be stated here.
Corrections
If a figure looks wrong, or you know an area better than its guide describes it, message me on Instagram or X. Corrections are applied and the page's update date changes.