The Junta de Andalucía has invested approximately €800,000 to roll out IoT-based smart city infrastructure across 38 municipalities and two autonomous local entities in northern Córdoba province, marking a significant push to bring digital governance tools to communities with fewer than 20,000 residents.
An IoT Network for Rural Andalusia
The initiative, formally titled Córdoba Distrito Smart Zona Norte, is led by the regional Ministry of University, Research and Innovation in partnership with the Diputación Provincial de Córdoba. The project budget stands at €789,330, with the Diputación’s provincial IT agency Eprinsa coordinating the technical deployment alongside Sandetel, the Andalusian government’s own telecommunications development body.
The deployment will place more than 800 devices across the participating municipalities, including environmental monitoring stations, temperature and humidity sensors, smart irrigation controllers, electrovalves, Bluetooth beacons, and surveillance cameras. The devices will feed data into a unified intelligent management platform that Eprinsa has developed through its existing Enlaza programme, which has served as the Diputación’s smart city backbone since 2015.
Part of a €9.25 Million Regional Programme
The Córdoba Zona Norte project sits within the broader Order CITI incentive programme, a Junta de Andalucía initiative valued at €9.25 million that funds 21 smart territory projects across 311 municipalities region-wide, collectively serving approximately 1.3 million residents. As Kurrant reported when the programme was first detailed in late 2024, the Order CITI funds are delivered as in-kind subsidies through competitive grants, with Sandetel overseeing procurement and implementation.
Up to €7.1 million of the total programme budget is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) via the Andalucía FEDER 2021-2027 operational programme. The remaining €2.15 million comes from participating local authorities. As of March 2026, 90% of the 21 projects are in the execution phase, with only two still in the procurement stage.
Three Smart Projects Spanning Córdoba Province
Within Córdoba province alone, three distinct projects under the Order CITI carry a combined investment of €1.8 million and touch 70 municipalities with a total population exceeding 291,000. The Zona Norte project covers the northern half, while its counterpart, Córdoba Distrito Smart Zona Sur, addresses 32 municipalities and two additional local entities in the southern portion with a budget of roughly €700,000.
A third standalone project targets the town of Pozoblanco with a €300,000 allocation dedicated to smart tourism. That effort will install 22 digital display screens and four outdoor information totems, alongside a dedicated platform for tourist promotion, digital signage management, and real-time parking occupancy monitoring to encourage sustainable mobility.
IoT Use Cases: From Irrigation to Public Safety
The seven intervention areas defined for the Córdoba deployments span a broad range of municipal services. A dedicated IoT sensorisation network, budgeted at roughly €315,000 across all 74 local entities in both the Norte and Sur zones, will serve as the foundational data backbone, linking sensors to centralised control and management platforms.
Beyond connectivity, the practical applications include smart irrigation programming to reduce water consumption in public green spaces, environmental monitoring stations tracking air quality and weather conditions, energy efficiency controls for public buildings, health and wellness data analytics, traffic management tools, and security infrastructure including video surveillance. The tourism-focused components in Pozoblanco add a visitor-facing digital layer with interactive signage and occupancy-aware parking guidance.
Bridging the Urban-Rural Digital Divide
The initiative is explicitly framed as a measure to counter digital inequality between Andalusia’s major cities and its smaller towns. The Order CITI exclusively targets municipalities below 20,000 inhabitants, a threshold that captures a vast majority of Andalusia’s local governments but one that typically lacks the budgetary capacity or technical expertise to deploy smart city solutions independently.
The Diputación de Córdoba was the only provincial institution in Spain to submit a unified proposal covering all its sub-20,000-inhabitant municipalities when the Order CITI grants were first awarded. That decision to present a single aggregated plan, rather than fragmented individual bids, was cited as a strategic choice to ensure territorial cohesion and avoid duplicated effort across the province.
Andalusia’s Next Step: Plan ARI 2030
Looking ahead, the regional government is preparing the Plan de Acción Andalucía Región Inteligente 2026-2030 (Plan ARI 2030), formally approved for development by the Consejo de Gobierno on 18 February 2026. The plan aims to build a regional ecosystem for replicable and scalable smart solutions grounded in data, research and innovation.
Sandetel will serve as the technical office for the plan’s design, which is expected to address areas including sensor networks, intelligent infrastructure platforms, city digital twins, and other enabling technologies. The ARI 2030 framework is intended to succeed the earlier Plan de Acción Andalucía Smart 2020 (PAAS 2020), under which the Order CITI was originally conceived, and to extend smart territory principles across all Andalusian municipalities regardless of size.
