in Barcelona
3 to 5 Nov 2026
The plenary session of the Ayuntamiento de Valdepeñas, the municipality in the province of Ciudad Real in Castilla-La Mancha, approved on 3 November 2026 an extraordinary credit of €225,523 to deliver “Valdepeñas Conectada”, a smart-territory programme with a total budget of €1.5 million that Red.es finances at 85% and the council at 15%, according to Lanza Digital. The vote passed with the abstention of the VOX group and of one non-attached councillor, and the programme builds an open data platform and a digital twin for the town.
A €1.5 Million Project Inside A 52-Project National Call
Valdepeñas is one of 52 beneficiaries of the RedCyTI Smart Economy call, for which the Spanish government announced on 15 September 2026 that more than €126 million would be mobilised, as Kurrant reported at the time. Red.es contributes more than €94 million from its own funds and the European Regional Development Fund, and the Valdepeñas award of €1.28 million corresponds to the 85% intensity that applies in Castilla-La Mancha to a €1.5 million project.
The call was opened under Order TDF/1559/2025, published in the Spanish official gazette on 30 December 2025 with a ceiling of €89.16 million, and Red.es received 59 applications between 31 January and 31 March 2026. Demand led the Red.es board to raise the ceiling to €150.53 million in August 2026, which allowed each of the 52 applications that cleared the scoring thresholds to be funded.
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Castilla-La Mancha secured four projects with a combined €5.71 million from Red.es: Albacete at €1.85 million, Toledo at €1.30 million, Alovera at €1.28 million and Valdepeñas at €1.28 million. Each project budget in the call ranges from €1.5 million to €6 million, which places Valdepeñas at the lower bound.
Red.es Tenders And Executes The Work
The grants under the RedCyTI programme are awarded in kind, so Red.es carries out the procurement and delivery of each project rather than transferring cash to the municipality. The local entity instead pays its share to Red.es, with half due six months after the agreement is signed and the remainder at 12 months.
Eligible costs include hardware, software deployment, cloud and communications services during implementation, advanced analytics, interoperable data publication and staff training. Beneficiaries must absorb all operating costs once deployment ends and keep each project financially sustainable for at least five years under European Union durability rules.
An Open Data Platform And A Digital Twin For Flood And Traffic Scenarios
Vanessa Irla, deputy mayor for finance, told the plenary session that the programme unifies existing initiatives on an open data platform that residents can access, and that it adds simulation tools for both the council and companies considering a move to the town. The programme also includes advisory services for local businesses and shops, according to Lanza Digital’s account of her remarks.
On the digital twin, Irla said the programme “creates a digital twin, which allows different simulations to be run in the event of a flood or a traffic problem,” in comments at the November 2026 plenary session reported by Lanza Digital, translated from Spanish. RedCyTI’s scope permits municipalities to apply artificial intelligence and digital twins to data already held on city platforms, and to support data sharing between local authorities and private companies through shared infrastructure.
Valdepeñas also approved at the same session its accession to the Red Española de Ciudades Inteligentes, the national network of smart cities.
Maintenance Costs Were The Opposition’s Question
The Grupo Popular supported attracting European funds but asked what the platform would cost the municipal budget to maintain, according to the plenary report, and its spokesperson, Cándida Tercero, cited the Marketplace and Smartdepeñas projects as examples of initiatives that lost momentum. Unidas por Valdepeñas requested a strategic plan on digitalisation.
The question has a defined answer in the programme rules, because operating costs fall to the beneficiary from the end of deployment and the five-year sustainability period begins at that point.
The 2018 Precedent Under Red.es’s First Smart Cities Call
Valdepeñas has run a Red.es co-funded programme before. Its Smartdepeñas project was selected in the first Red.es smart cities call and co-financed with European Regional Development Fund money, with a budget of €800,000 of which the council contributed 25% back in 2018.
By that date the council reported that more than 80% of the planned actions were complete across nine technology measures. The municipal archive digitisation of 807 boxes and 190 record books was finished, the e-government adaptation was complete, the tourism app was 80% complete and the geographic information system was 75% complete.
The new project is almost twice the size of the first at €1.5 million, with the council share falling from 25% to 15%. The six-month and 12-month transfer dates to Red.es, followed by a Red.es tender for the platform and a five-year operating period, now set the timetable against which Valdepeñas will be measured.
