Spain publishes every commercial-registry act — incorporations, director changes, insolvencies — in an official gazette called BORME (Boletín Oficial del Registro Mercantil). Most tools we found scrape its PDFs. It turns out you don't need to: since 2009 there is an official open-data API on boe.es that almost nobody seems to use. We just finished backfilling all of it — 9.5 million company events, 2009 → today — and these are the notes we wish we'd had at the start.
The API nobody talks about
Daily summary: https://www.boe.es/datosabiertos/api/borme/sumario/{YYYYMMDD} with Accept: application/json → lists ~50 provincial XML files per business day, each with a direct url_xml. No auth, no keys, no rate-limit headers.
The XML is clean, structured, and 1:1 with the PDFs. If you are parsing BORME PDFs today: stop. The XML makes an entire class of problems (page breaks mid-record!) disappear.
Six traps that cost us real time
