Spain eSIM
Data for Spain on Movistar and Orange, from $5.89. It never expires, tethering is included, and you install Orbislo once rather than once per trip.
- Networks
- Movistar and Orange
- Real speed
- 79 Mbps median, 23 Mbps for the slowest tenth2,940 travellers, rolling 90 days
- 5G
- yes, non standalone
- Throttle
- None on metered plans
- Tethering
- Allowed on every plan
Plans for Spain
| Data | Validity | Price per GB | Price | Buy |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 GB | Never expires | $5.89 | $5.89 | |
| 3 GB | Never expires | $2.63 | $7.89 | |
| 5 GBMost travellers | Never expires | $1.98 | $9.89 | |
| 10 GB | Never expires | $1.49 | $14.89 | |
| 20 GB | Never expires | $1.19 | $23.89 | |
| 50 GB | Never expires | $0.94 | $46.89 |
Every plan works the moment you land. Unused data returns to your wallet when the plan ends, and there is 100 MB of free rescue data on your account even at zero balance.
What 79 Mbps actually means in Spain
Travellers on Orbislo in Spain see a median download of 79 Mbps, measured across 2940 real sessions rather than a speed test we ran ourselves. That sits close to the Europe median of 71 Mbps, which makes Spain an unremarkable place to be connected, in the good sense.
The tenth percentile is 23 Mbps. That gap between the median and the floor is normal and it is where the frustration lives: the connection is quick most of the time and noticeably slow in the busiest few percent of moments, typically at transport hubs at peak hour.
At these speeds nothing on a phone is limited by the connection. Video calls are comfortable, a laptop can be tethered for a full working day, and large photo backups finish without planning around them.
Which networks you will be on
Orbislo carries traffic in Spain on Movistar and Orange. Your phone is not tied to one of them. When the network you are attached to congests or drops, the profile moves you to the other, and it happens without a prompt and without you noticing anything except that the connection kept working.
This matters more than the headline speed. Almost every travel eSIM sold today resells a single upstream agreement per country, so when that one network has a bad hour you have a bad hour with it and your only option is to buy a second eSIM from somebody else. A profile with more than one network behind it can make a decision you never see.
5G in Spain: yes, non standalone. Worth knowing that 5G on a travel profile is normal rather than special, and that the tenth percentile above is the number that will decide how the trip feels, not the generation label in the status bar.
What data costs in Spain
A 500 MB plan for Spain starts at $0.32, which is $0.00 a gigabyte. That is the number to compare between providers, because a headline price attached to a different allowance tells you nothing.
The comparison most providers would rather you did not run is cost per gigabyte actually used. Independent surveys of travel data put the share of purchased data lost to expiry between 20 and 35 percent, because a plan that expires on day thirty deletes what you did not get through. Orbislo data has no expiry date, so the gigabyte you paid for is still there on the next trip. At the same headline price that is 25 to 40 percent more usable data, and in Spain it means the effective cost is nearer $0.00 a gigabyte than $0.00.
Because nothing expires, the cheapest way to buy for Spain is to buy slightly less than you think you need and top up if you run out. Topping up takes about ten seconds and does not involve installing anything. Buying too much is the expensive mistake everywhere else and merely a neutral one here.
Landing in Spain
Install before you fly, on your home wifi. The profile downloads while you still have a connection you trust, then sits dormant until you land in Spain and it attaches to Movistar. Median time from tapping install to having service across all Orbislo orders is 41 seconds.
On landing there is one thing to check and it is the thing that goes wrong about sixty percent of the time people tell us they have no service: data roaming has to be switched on for the Orbislo line. It is off by default on both iOS and Android, and it has nothing to do with roaming charges here, because the plan is prepaid and there is no bill to run up. Turn it on for the Orbislo line and leave it off for your home line, and your home number keeps working for calls and bank codes without costing anything.
Coverage across Spain
The measurements above are aggregated across Spain, and a national median hides real variation. We publish separate figures for Barcelona, Madrid, Seville and Valencia, because the difference between a capital and a coastal town is usually larger than the difference between two countries.
Outside the cities, coverage follows the same pattern it does everywhere: the main roads and the tourist corridors are well served, and it thins in the mountains and on the water. No travel eSIM changes that, because it is the same physical network the local population uses. What a multi network profile changes is which of the available towers you get to use.
Getting a local SIM in Spain
A prepaid card is sold only against an identity document, and the operator records the buyer's name, surname, nationality and document number in a register it is obliged to keep.
What is restricted in Spain
- Phones while driving: Spanish traffic law bans using a mobile phone while driving unless the call is fully hands-free without headphones or earphones. Holding the phone in the hand while driving is listed as a serious offence and costs six points on the driving licence points scale.
Worth knowing about Spain
- Spain is inside the European Union roam like at home area, so a plan from another EU country is billed at its domestic rates here, with any fair use limit set against the price of that contract.
- Dialling 112 in Spain is free and reaches the regional emergency centre, which handles medical emergencies, fire and rescue, public safety and, where these need coordinating, civil protection.
- The 112 service in the Canary Islands answers calls directly in Spanish, English, German, Italian and French, and brings in a remote interpreter for up to 50 other languages as a three way call. It handled 19,968 calls in languages other than Spanish in 2025, about two thirds of them in English.
- Spain sends emergency warnings through ES-Alert, a cell broadcast system run by the Interior Ministry. Every phone connected to a mobile cell in the affected area receives the alert automatically, without subscribing or giving a phone number, and the system never learns which numbers received it.
- Level 1 ES-Alert messages cannot be switched off on the phone, while lower level pre-alerts can. Reception is supported from Android 11 and iOS 15.6 onwards and cannot be relied on with older operating system versions.
- The prepaid buyer register is not only kept, it is shared: from activation until the legal retention period ends, operators must hand the buyer's identity details to police forces, the national intelligence centre or customs surveillance officers when they request them for their duties.
- ES-Alert exists because the European Electronic Communications Code, transposed in Spain by the General Telecommunications Law 11/2022, required every member state to have a mobile phone public warning system working from 21 June 2022.
- A visitor roaming on an EU plan is protected by an automatic cut-off: once extra roaming charges reach 50 euros, or a lower limit the customer has chosen, the home operator must stop roaming service unless the customer confirms they want to continue and pay.
- On a ferry or cruise ship, EU roaming prices apply only while the phone is connected to a land based network, such as in port. Once service comes from an on board satellite system, EU price caps no longer apply, so switching off roaming or using flight mode at sea avoids unregulated charges.
- A complaint about a Spanish phone line goes to the operator first, which must give a reference number. If there is no answer within a month, or the answer is unsatisfactory, the customer has three months to take it to the government's telecoms user office, which must decide within six months.
How Spain compares across Europe
- Speed rank
- 18 of 47 destinations we have measured in Europe
- Regional median
- 71 Mbps
- Consistency
- The slowest tenth still reaches 29 percent of the median
- Upstream networks
- 2, Movistar, Orange
- 5G
- Yes, non standalone
- Next fastest nearby
- Iceland, 81 Mbps
- Next slowest nearby
- Belgium, 77 Mbps
- Cities with their own page
- 4: Barcelona, Madrid, Seville, Valencia
- tenth percentile
- 23 Mbps
- Behind these figures
- 2940 travellers, rolling 90 days
