eSIM for Spain: Madrid and Barcelona on One Card

Two city keywords carry this market and neither of them is hard. Barcelona brings 170 searches a month at a difficulty of 15, Madrid brings 140 at 13, and both numbers sit at the bottom of the range for Spain. Together they are 310 searches asking a question with one answer, which is that there is no Barcelona plan and no Madrid plan.

That is not a gap in the market. A search for a Barcelona eSIM and a search for a Madrid eSIM end at the same ten plans, because every brand here sells one national product riding the same four network names. A card bought for a Barcelona weekend is the same card that works in Madrid the following Tuesday. The city decides the itinerary. The size decides the bill, and the difference between the two cities is measured in gigabytes rather than in products.

This page prices the 202 Spain plans those ten brands sell, recomputed from the plan files on 24 October 2026, and it answers the two questions the city queries really contain. How big a plan a two-city week needs, and whether a single country card beats a European bundle on a route that crosses a border.

Why Barcelona and Madrid buy the same card

The two cities are 620km apart by rail and two and a half hours by train, and they are one market for mobile data in the only sense that matters to a buyer. No brand in this comparison sells a Catalonia product, a Madrid product or anything narrower than Spain.

The network answer reinforces it. All ten brands list the same four names, Movistar, Vodafone, Orange and Yoigo, in the same order, with no exceptions in the plan files. A phone in the Gothic Quarter and a phone on Gran Vía are attaching to the same pool of networks under the same wholesale arrangement.

So the city query resolves to a country purchase, and the useful work is sizing it.

A four-day Barcelona leg uses about 3GB. That is maps to the Sagrada Família and back, metro and Rodalies tickets bought in an app, restaurant searches, a translation app in a market and a few hundred photo uploads, and it leaves room for a video call. A three-day Madrid leg uses less, perhaps 2GB, because the city is walkable and the museums replace the navigation.

The two legs together land under 5GB for a seven-day trip, and the shelf charges $4.00 for 5GB and $6.00 for 10GB. The gap is two dollars, and the larger plan removes the only decision that can go wrong on the trip. A traveller who films a flamenco night and uploads it in full has spent the difference twice over.

That is the whole of the city question. The same card, and a size chosen for the itinerary rather than for the postcode.

What the four network names actually are

Spain lists four consumer brands and, since the merger that closed in 2024, three physical networks. Orange and Yoigo now sit inside one company, MásOrange, and ride the same infrastructure. Movistar is Telefónica. Vodafone España is owned by Zegona rather than by the Vodafone group, and it keeps the name.

That matters to a buyer for one reason. A plan sold as Orange coverage and a plan sold as Yoigo coverage are the same radio network wearing two logos, so a comparison that ranks brands by their network list is ranking nothing. The network breakdown for Spain sets out where the three differ, and the differences are geographic rather than commercial. The regulator’s own market data is where the ownership changes are recorded rather than announced.

The brand question is therefore a price question, and the price spread is wider here. A Spanish SIM card bought at a counter can also be pinned to a single network, which a Spain eSIM cannot, and that is the only thing the local route adds on this axis. The same 20GB month runs from $9.00 to $38.50, a factor of 4.3, on identical networks with identical data.

One search deserves a note because it is large and cannot be won. Orange Spain carries 1,300 searches a month at a difficulty of 52, and almost all of it is people looking for the operator’s own shop page rather than for a travel product. The version a visitor can actually buy is a travel eSIM that rides Orange, and it costs $6.00 for 10GB at Roamic rather than a monthly contract with a Spanish direct debit.

Where the price ladder sits by size

The shelf runs from $0.51 to $105.50, a ratio of 207 to one, and the metered plans run from $0.45 to $4.50 a gigabyte with a median of $1.32.

Each row takes the cheapest plan that brand sells at that allowance. Two rows carry a warning that the headline hides, because a cheapest price on a short window is not the cheapest plan for a trip.

At 50GB the cheapest is aloSIM at $25.00 for ten days. Roamic charges $26.00 for the same 50GB over thirty days, which means one dollar buys twenty extra days and the headline price is the worse buy for any trip longer than a fortnight. At 5GB the tie goes the same way, with Ubigi and Roamic both at $4.00 and Ubigi giving thirty days against twenty-one.

At 20GB the dearest is Jetpac at $38.50, which is 4.3 times Ubigi’s $9.00 and the widest multiple on the ladder. It is also the plan that shows how these sellers price time.

The rung that costs more for less time

Jetpac sells 20GB for fourteen days at $25.00 and the same 20GB for twenty-one days at $38.50. The extra week costs $13.50, which is 54% on top of the total, for no extra data at all.

The same seller charges $38.50 for 20GB over twenty-one days and $44.50 for 30GB over the same twenty-one days, so ten extra gigabytes cost $6.00 while seven extra days cost $13.50. The window is what the price tracks. A buyer who compares two Jetpac plans by their gigabyte count will pick the wrong one, and the full plan table sorts all 202 rows by rate so the anomaly is visible before payment rather than after.

Jetpac is not alone in pricing windows strangely, and its unlimited shelf is the clearest case. Thirty days of unlimited costs $105.50 there, against $37.00 at Roamic for a product with a published daily allowance. That is 2.85 times the price for the same 3GB a day, and the fallback speed is a full megabit on both.

Roamic charges $37.00 for that month and Ubigi $44.00, which is the pair to compare before paying more. Airalo sits in the middle at $63.00 for thirty days unlimited and $14.00 for 10GB, which is more than double Roamic’s $6.00 for the same allowance on the same networks. alosim holds the cheapest 50GB at $25.00 and the dearest thirty-day unlimited at $72.50, which is a strange pair of ends for one seller to occupy.

One card or a Europe bundle

This is the question that decides a multi-country route, and it has an arithmetic answer rather than an opinion.

A Spain-only plan stops at the border. Portugal is the next country for most Iberian itineraries, and the Portuguese shelf is priced identically to the Spanish one at every size that matters. Roamic charges $3.00 for 3GB, $4.00 for 5GB, $6.00 for 10GB and $11.00 for 20GB in both countries, to the cent.

That makes the border arithmetic unusually clean. Spain at 10GB for thirty days costs $6.00. Portugal at 5GB for twenty-one days costs $4.00. A two-country route is $10.00 for 15GB, which is $5.00 per country, and the second country costs $4.00 rather than a premium.

Set that against a single country. Spain alone at 20GB for thirty days costs $9.00 on Ubigi and $11.00 on Roamic. So adding Portugal costs one dollar on the Ubigi comparison and takes five gigabytes off the total allowance. A traveller who would have bought 20GB for Spain and now buys 10GB plus 5GB gets a second country for a dollar and gives up a bucket that a two-week trip will not empty.

Three countries change the shape. Spain at 10GB, Portugal at 5GB and France at 5GB come to $14.00, which is $4.67 per country, and the marginal cost falls with each addition because every leg is sized to its own days rather than to the whole trip.

That declining marginal cost is the argument a European bundle has to answer. A bundle sells one allowance shared across every country on its list, which means a traveller pays for validity and volume sized to the longest leg and the hungriest one. Two plans let each leg be sized separately, and on this route the legs are cheap enough that the sum stays near $10.00.

The threshold is the number to carry to checkout. A two-country route here costs $10.00 as two plans, and a bundle has to land under that to win. At three countries the bar is $14.00. The Europe coverage list shows which products name Portugal and France at all, and the Portugal table prices the western leg in full. What a Spanish prepaid line would have done instead is roam at domestic rates under the EU roaming rules, a right that attaches to a European subscriber and not to a reseller’s data profile.

There is one case where the bundle wins on grounds other than price, and it is worth naming. A route that crosses four or five borders in ten days, on trains, with no time to install a second profile at each stop, buys convenience rather than data. Two profiles cost less and demand more attention.

What seven days across two cities draws

The two-city week is the shape most Spain trips take, and it is cheaper in data than the itinerary suggests.

Barcelona for four days runs to about 3GB and Madrid for three to about 2GB, which puts the trip at 5GB before anything unusual happens. The 5GB plan at $4.00 covers it and the 10GB at $6.00 covers it twice, so the whole decision is worth two dollars.

Three things move the estimate.

A restaurant habit. Menus in Spain are increasingly behind a QR code, and a table of four scanning four menus is four sessions on one connection. Parking meters and city transport tickets run through apps in the same way. None of it uses much data and all of it fails without a connection, which is why the estimate for Spain runs above the same week elsewhere in Europe.

A day trip. Toledo from Madrid or Montserrat from Barcelona adds a rail booking, an offline map that has to be downloaded in advance and a few hours of navigation in a place where the phone is the only map.

A football night or a festival. An evening of video sent home is a gigabyte, and a match uploaded in full is several.

The pricing absorbs all of it. 5GB costs $4.00, 10GB costs $6.00 and 20GB costs $9.00, so the ladder from the smallest sensible plan to a generous one is five dollars. The trip-length board prices the cheapest plan that actually fits a given number of days, which is a more useful sort than the headline sizes.

Where the flat rate stops being flat

100 of the 202 Spain plans are sold flat-rate, which is 49.5%, and nine of those run a full thirty days.

What separates two unlimited plans at the same window is the number the checkout never shows. Roamic publishes 3GB a day at full speed and 1Mbps after it. Ubigi publishes a different figure on each plan, and its thirty-day Spain plan states 5GB a day with a 2Mbps fallback. Saily publishes 5GB a day. Jetpac and Nomad publish 3GB and 2GB. aloSIM publishes a range. Holafly publishes nothing.

Roami is the case to read carefully rather than quickly. Its destination pages state 30GB a day, its UK guide cites 2GB a day on the unlimited tier, and its own USA page claims no throttle at all. Three figures from one seller, which means the honest reading is that the threshold is unknown until the plan page for the exact country is open.

Read the published figures against the thirty-day prices and the shelf reorders itself. Roamic charges $37.00 for 3GB a day. Ubigi charges $44.00 for 5GB a day and a faster fallback, which is the best combination on this shelf for seven dollars more. Airalo charges $63.00 for the same 5GB a day and a slower fallback. Jetpac charges $105.50 and prints 3GB.

A metered plan sidesteps the question. It does not slow down, it stops, and it stops on a date the buyer chose. Every threshold a brand does publish sits beside its plan in the fair-use table.

A year of data and who it suits

The annual shelf looks like a bargain and mostly is not.

Ubigi sells 24GB across 365 days for $18.00, which is $0.75 a gigabyte and $0.05 a day. A 20GB month costs $9.00 on the same brand, which is $0.45 a gigabyte. Anyone who can finish 20GB inside thirty days is paying 67% more per gigabyte for the annual product.

The daily figure is what makes the annual plan look cheap, and it is an artefact of the denominator. $18.00 divided by 365 is five cents a day, and that number says nothing about the price of data. It says that a year is long.

The 60GB annual plan at $32.00 comes to $0.53 a gigabyte, which is close to the monthly rate of $0.55 at Roamic’s 20GB and still dearer than Ubigi’s $0.45 at the same size. It is the better of the two annual products and it still loses to a monthly plan on rate.

The case for a year is narrow and real. A stay of three months or more on maps, messages and the occasional upload fits inside 24GB, and no thirty-day plan covers that span because it dies in week five. That is the pattern where $18.00 beats buying three times.

Buying the card before you fly

Nothing is posted. The profile arrives as a QR code by email or as a button in the seller’s app, usually within minutes, and both routes need a live connection at the moment the code is opened. That is the argument for buying at home rather than in the departures hall.

A euro card adds two lines the product page does not show. Prices are quoted in dollars, so the issuer converts at its own rate on the day, and most euro cards add a foreign-currency fee of one to three per cent. A plan listed at $9.00 can post at $9.30, and the difference belongs to the bank.

The refund is the part almost nobody reads. European distance-selling rules give fourteen days to change your mind, but digital content falls outside that right once performance has begun, and installing the profile counts as beginning. Sellers make the buyer tick a box accepting this before the code is issued, which is why the country list and the validity window have to be checked before payment.

Three settings decide whether it works on landing. Name the travel line, point mobile data at it, and turn data roaming on for it while leaving it off on the home line. A travel eSIM counts as roaming on the network it joins, which is why the setting is required rather than optional. The installation walkthrough covers the QR route and the manual route, and the compatibility check settles whether the handset accepts a profile at all.

When it stops working at the airport

A data line left on the home SIM, nearly every time. The other version is a profile that is switched on but not selected for mobile data, which produces a phone that shows bars and moves nothing. Both are one setting away from fixed.

Two failures look like seller faults and are not. A handset still locked to a home carrier refuses the profile outright, and a phone without the Spanish bands will hold a signal in Madrid and lose it in the Pyrenees. Both are settled before the flight.

The airport adds a trap of its own. Wifi at Madrid and Barcelona asks for a mobile number before the session starts at some terminals, which is a problem for anyone planning to install on arrival using airport wifi and the reason the install belongs at home.

The support question has the same answer as everywhere else in this market. A Spanish prepaid line bought at a Movistar or Orange counter comes with a counter in the same time zone. A travel eSIM is a wholesale product that no Spanish operator holds a record of, so the only support that can touch the profile is the seller’s. Keep the order number, the email address the code went to, the handset model and the exact step that fails, and do not delete the profile before the order number is in hand, because deleting it destroys the only proof that a purchase exists. The comparison table prices the alternative for anyone still deciding, and dual SIM keeps a home number live for bank codes while the Spanish profile carries the data.