Live data · Engineering
More than twenty-five data sources in one app
SomosTorre aggregates more than twenty-five data sources and presents them as one. As of 27 August 2026 there are twenty-eight: twenty-two public — national, regional, municipal and professional bodies — and six commercial or community. This is the whole list, because the number is only interesting if you can see it broken down.
When a civic platform gets quoted, “integrate data sources” appears as one line. It is the line most often underestimated, because twenty-eight sources are not twenty-eight times one: they are twenty-eight formats, twenty-eight refresh rates and twenty-eight different ways to fail, under a screen that has to stay usable while one of them is doing exactly that.
We publish the full list for two reasons. The first is that reusing open data obliges you to credit the source, and we are glad to have it visible. The second is that anyone can say “we integrate many sources”; showing them one by one is what separates that sentence from a checkable fact.
The list, as of 27 August 2026
Mobility and transport:
| Source | What it provides |
|---|---|
| DGT | Traffic incidents and cameras, via the national access point |
| Ministry of Transport (NAP) | ALSA and Renfe Cercanías timetables |
| Renfe | Live Cercanías information |
| Torrebus | Torrelavega city bus times and stops |
| Parkunload | Loading-bay availability |
| OpenChargeMap | Electric vehicle charging points |
Energy, environment and sea:
| Source | What it provides |
|---|---|
| Red Eléctrica (ESIOS) | Hourly electricity price, market, energy mix and emissions |
| MITECO | Fuel prices, via the national fuel-station portal |
| Government of Cantabria | Live air quality from the region’s monitoring stations |
| AEMET | Weather, and beach and mountain forecasts |
| Open-Meteo | Pollen levels |
| Port of Santander | Official tide tables |
| IHM | Tides, as a fallback for the above |
| NÁYADE (Health Ministry) | Bathing water quality and beach classification |
Administration, transparency and statistics:
| Source | What it provides |
|---|---|
| BOC | The official gazette of Cantabria |
| Torrelavega town council | Municipal news from the official site |
| PLACSP | Public contracts of the council and Aguas Torrelavega S.A. |
| INE | Municipal population and demographics |
| ICANE | Cantabrian demographics and income |
| SEPE | Registered unemployment and contracts |
| Portal Estadístico | Municipal statistics aggregated from INE, TGSS, Treasury and Interior |
City, commerce and daily life:
| Source | What it provides |
|---|---|
| Pasea Torrelavega | Cultural and events calendar |
| TMCE | Programme of the Concha Espina municipal theatre |
| Torrelavega Chamber of Commerce | News, courses and business directory |
| Google Places | Business directory, a licensed commercial service |
| COF Cantabria | On-duty pharmacies |
| 365scores | Live sports results |
| OpenStreetMap / Nominatim | Mapping and geocoding |
The 28 sources across four areas: energy, environment and sea contributes 8; administration and city, 7 each; mobility and transport, 6.
Number of sources · 28 in total, as of 27 August 2026 · Full list above
What differs between them
Almost everything. A tide table is stable for months; the hourly electricity price changes once a day at a fixed time; traffic incidents change every few minutes; the population register changes once a year. An integrator that treats them alike either over-fetches and gets its requests refused, or shows stale data without knowing it.
- Format: modern JSON, XML, CSV, and pages built to be read with eyes rather than by a program.
- Cadence: from seconds to a year, which means caching to each source’s real shelf life rather than one shared number.
- Authentication: some need a key and some do not, and keys expire at moments nobody has written down.
- Licensing: reuse of PLACSP data falls under Spain’s Law 37/2007, and Google Places is a commercial service under contract. Not everything integrated is open.
- Reliability: not all of them are built to be consumed by somebody else in production, and some go down without telling anyone.
The clean screen is the outcome; nearly all of the work is in what happens when a source does not answer.
What happens when one goes down
It goes down. That is the premise rather than the exception, and the app is built assuming it. One example is visible in the list itself: tides have two sources, the Port of Santander as primary and the Naval Hydrographic Institute as an alternative. That second name is not there for completeness — it is there because the number has to appear even when the first one does not answer.
The rest of the pattern is the same across all of them: serve the last good value with its update time visible, degrade the card rather than break the screen, and never let one slow integration block the rest. What a resident should never have to know is which of them is having a bad day.
Why this costs what it costs
A custom civic platform starts at €30,000 and its operation at €450 a month, and this list is much of the explanation. The cost is not writing twenty-eight API clients: it is more than twenty-five third parties changing whenever it suits them while the app stays standing, indefinitely, without anybody at the council having to find out.
Frequently asked questions
How many data sources does SomosTorre integrate?
More than twenty-five; as of 27 August 2026, twenty-eight. Twenty-two are public — national government, the Government of Cantabria, Torrelavega town council, and professional bodies such as the Chamber of Commerce and the pharmacists’ association — and six are commercial or community sources such as Google Places, Parkunload and OpenStreetMap. The full list is in this note and on SomosTorre’s legal page.
What happens if a data source stops responding?
The app serves the last good value with its update time visible and degrades that card without breaking the screen. Where the data justifies it there is a second source: tides are read from the Port of Santander and, if it does not answer, from the Naval Hydrographic Institute.
Does integrating twenty-five sources cost twenty-five times as much as integrating one?
No — it costs less than that to build and more than that to maintain. Each integration is written once, but all of them change, expire keys and fail independently for the life of the system. That is why a custom platform starts at €30,000 and its operation at €450 a month.
Do you need permission to reuse public-sector open data?
In Spain, reuse of public-sector information is governed by Law 37/2007, which generally allows reuse provided the source is credited and the data is not distorted. Some sources add their own conditions or require a key, and not everything that looks open is: part of what SomosTorre integrates are commercial services under contract.