Boletín Oficial del Estado

Overview

The Boletín Oficial del Estado (BOE) is the official gazette of Spain: the journal in which Spanish laws, regulations and other acts of compulsory publication appear, and the publication that makes them binding (População e Sociedade). Its lineage runs back to the Gaceta de Madrid, first printed in 1661, but the gazette only became a true official journal in 1762, when the Crown took over its printing, and it has carried its present name since 1936 (População e Sociedade). It is published by the Agencia Estatal Boletín Oficial del Estado, a public body under the Ministry of the Presidency, Justice and Parliamentary Relations (Boletín Oficial del Estado).

The BOE’s constitutional role is simple and absolute: under Article 9.3 of the 1978 Constitution, the Constitution guarantees “the publicity of the norms”, so publication of the rules is a legal imperative, channelled through the official journals, the BOE in the State’s case (População e Sociedade). Under Royal Decree 181/2008 of 8 February, the BOE is the official journal of the Spanish state, dedicated to publishing laws, provisions and acts of mandatory insertion and of obligatory compliance (População e Sociedade). Its texts have official and authentic status: a law published in the BOE is the law, not a report of it (Boletín Oficial del Estado). Since 1 January 2009 that status belongs to the electronic edition, published on the Agency’s website and protected by an advanced digital signature (Boletín Oficial del Estado).

From news gazette to official journal

The BOE’s origins lie in the news gazettes that spread across Europe in the seventeenth century — printed “avisos” whose very name came from the Venetian coin, the gazzetta, that they cost (População e Sociedade). Sweden’s Ordinar PostTijdender of 1645 is treated as the first official newspaper of the type, and Spain followed twelve years later, in 1661 (População e Sociedade). The first Madrid gazette, the Gazeta nueva de los sucesos políticos y militares, appeared in February 1661, promoted not by the king but by Juan José de Austria, the illegitimate son of Philip IV, through his secretary Francisco Fabro Bremundán (População e Sociedade).

For its first century the gazette was a private, news-driven publication, and its early content would surprise a modern reader: the 1661 Gaceta carried horrifying crimes, cases of witchcraft, curious popular festivals, astronomical phenomena and bullfights (Cadena SER). Mixing lurid chronicles with laws was a deliberate strategy to attract buyers who did not want to read only laws and regulations (Cadena SER). The publication privilege belonged to Fabro Bremundán until his death in 1690; Charles II then granted it to the Hospital General, and in 1697 Juan de Goyeneche obtained it, the paper officially taking the name Gaceta de Madrid on 2 April 1697 (População e Sociedade).

The decisive turn came in 1762, under Charles III, when the Secretariat of State took over the printing and the Crown incorporated the privilege, making the Gaceta a true official newspaper, censored, administered and ideologically oriented by the State (População e Sociedade). It is from 1762 that the Gaceta de Madrid can properly be called the real antecedent of the BOE (População e Sociedade). The nineteenth century then made publication legally decisive: in 1836, government decrees, orders and instructions were deemed obligatory from the moment they were published in the Gaceta (Boletín Oficial del Estado), and in 1886 the Gaceta was restricted to documents of general interest, ordered by urgency and ministry seniority, a scheme refined by a Royal Order of 6 June 1909 (População e Sociedade).

The title changed with the politics of each era, but the function barely varied. During the Spanish Civil War the Burgos government used the designation Boletín Oficial del Estado to distinguish its gazette from the Gaceta de la República, and the BOE name, adopted in October 1936, definitively replaced the historic Gaceta after the conflict (Boletín Oficial del Estado; Cadena SER). The name was kept until 1961, then carried as Boletín Oficial del Estado – Gaceta de Madrid until 1986, when it became simply Boletín Oficial del Estado (Boletín Oficial del Estado).

Title	Dates
Gazeta nueva de los sucesos políticos y militares	1661–1662
Gaceta de Madrid	1697–1936
Boletín Oficial del Estado	1936–1961
Boletín Oficial del Estado: Gaceta de Madrid	1961–1986
Boletín Oficial del Estado	1986–present

Source: População e Sociedade (main titles only; the full sequence, including wartime variants such as the Gazeta Ministerial de Sevilla and the Gaceta de la República, is in the research brief).

What the BOE publishes

The BOE publishes five categories of material: the general provisions of the bodies of the State and international treaties and conventions; the general provisions of the autonomous communities, under their Statutes of Autonomy; the resolutions and acts of the constitutional bodies of the State; the non-general provisions, resolutions and acts of ministerial departments and other State bodies, when a law or royal decree so provides; and calls, citations, warrants and announcements, when a law or royal decree so provides (Boletín Oficial del Estado). The Council of Ministers may exceptionally order the publication of reports, documents or official communications whose dissemination is considered of public interest (Boletín Oficial del Estado). In practice this means the BOE carries the laws approved by the Cortes Generales — the Congress of Deputies and the Senate — the provisions of the Government of Spain, and the general provisions of the autonomous communities (População e Sociedade).

The gazette is organised into five sections (Boletín Oficial del Estado): Section I, General provisions (organic laws, laws, royal legislative decrees and royal decree-laws, international treaties, autonomous-community laws and regulations); Section II, Authorities and personnel (appointments and public competitive examinations); Section III, Other provisions (grant rules, prizes, service charters, collective agreements, university curricula); Section IV, Administration of Justice (judicial auctions and procedural acts); and Section V, Announcements (public-sector procurement and other announcements). A separate supplement carries the rulings, declarations and orders of the Constitutional Court (População e Sociedade).

Within each section, texts are grouped by the issuing body under the general order of precedence of the State, and autonomous-community provisions follow the order in which their Statutes of Autonomy were officially published; within each heading the texts are ordered by the hierarchy of the norms, and every issue carries a summary of its contents (Boletín Oficial del Estado). The BOE is also a publisher of record for the acts of everyday administration: when Spain’s Ministry of the Interior declared the Asociación Española de Familias de Personas con Sordoceguera (APASCIDE) to be of public utility, the order appeared in the BOE as BOE-A-2006-8313 (Boletín Oficial del Estado). Laws, royal decree-laws and royal legislative decrees, once signed by the King and published in Spanish, may also be published in the other co-official languages of the autonomous communities, as supplements under collaboration agreements with Catalonia, Galicia, the Basque Country and Valencia (Boletín Oficial del Estado).

The end of paper: the digital BOE

By the 2000s the paper BOE had become physically unmanageable. In 2016, with the Government in caretaker status, the BOE still published 171,905 pages, and on the last working day of 2017 the State published 1,000 pages in a single day, including 15 decrees and 5 ministerial orders (População e Sociedade). Subscriptions had fallen from 50,749 in 1996 to 16,000 in 2007, while online consultations reached 2.5 million documents a day — figures quoted from a 2008 El País report inside the academic history (População e Sociedade). The paper edition cost 3,500 tonnes of paper and €6.3 million in 2007, against under €200,000 for the digital renewal, electronic-signature certification, servers and new production system; the regional governments of Valencia and Catalonia estimated savings of €900,000 and €700,000 respectively from ending their own paper editions (População e Sociedade).

The legal groundwork came in two steps: Royal Decree 1495/2007 of 12 November created the Agencia Estatal Boletín Oficial del Estado and approved its statute, and Royal Decree 181/2008 of 8 February regulated the electronic publication (População e Sociedade). Law 11/2007 of 22 June, on citizens’ electronic access to public services, had already provided that electronic publication of official journals would have the same effects as print, and that the BOE’s electronic publication would be official and authentic from 1 January 2009 (População e Sociedade). From that date the electronic edition published on the Agency’s website has been the official and authentic one; before it, only the paper edition held that status, and the print edition was retained for conservation and permanence (Boletín Oficial del Estado; População e Sociedade).

Authenticity rests on two mechanisms: an advanced digital signature included separately in each provision since 1 January 2009, and the CVE, an Electronic Verification Code printed on every page that uniquely identifies each provision, act and announcement (Boletín Oficial del Estado). Any paper copy of the electronic originals is official and authentic if it includes the CVE, and entering the code on the BOE website returns the signed original (Boletín Oficial del Estado). The official and authentic edition is the signed PDF; the same contents are also offered in HTML, XML and, for Section I since 2010, ePUB, for information only (Boletín Oficial del Estado). Access is universal and free, and the site offers the calendar of gazettes from 1 September 1960 to date (Boletín Oficial del Estado; New York University Law Library).

The digital BOE is also a research database, not just a daily journal: its search facilities cover general provisions of state, regional and European scope from 1960, with a legal analysis of each norm and the consolidated text of basic state regulations, autonomous-community legislation from 1980, and European legislation from 1952, published in the Official Journal of the European Union (População e Sociedade).

The Agency behind the gazette

The Agencia Estatal Boletín Oficial del Estado is a public body under the Ministry of the Presidency, Justice and Parliamentary Relations, with differentiated public legal personality, its own assets and treasury, and full management and functional autonomy within the Law on State Agencies and its own statute (Boletín Oficial del Estado). Royal Decree 1495/2007 created the Agency in its present form, replacing the structure the BOE had carried through the twentieth century (Boletín Oficial del Estado). Its three strategic objectives are to fulfil efficiently the public service of publicising the norms in the BOE and in the BORME, the Official Gazette of the Commercial Registry; to achieve the maximum dissemination of legislation; and to keep operating the portal of judicial, notarial and administrative auctions (Boletín Oficial del Estado).

Beyond the gazette, the Agency exclusively edits, publishes and disseminates the BOE and the BORME, manages the announcements in both, runs its electronic seat, publishes repertoires, compilations and legal texts with permanent updating and consolidation, manages the auctions portal, edits the parliamentary gazettes and bulletins, and processes official gazettes retrospectively (Boletín Oficial del Estado). Its main offices are in Madrid: the Manoteras office, at Avenida de Manoteras 54, houses the Imprenta Nacional, the National Printworks, and most of the management services, while the Trafalgar office, at Calle Trafalgar 27, houses the bookshop (Boletín Oficial del Estado). The Agency operates a quality management system certified to ISO 9001:2015, holds a Forest Stewardship Council certificate for the National Printworks’ publications, and has won awards including the Premio Ciudadanía 2022 for its electronic COVID-19 codes and first prize in the Premio TAW 2009 for the most accessible website (Boletín Oficial del Estado).

The BOE does not stand alone: with the 1978 Constitution, each of the 17 autonomous communities acquired its own official bulletin, 19 in total counting Ceuta and Melilla — among them the Boletín Oficial de la Junta de Andalucía (BOJA), the Diari Oficial de la Generalitat de Catalunya (DOGC) and the Boletín Oficial del País Vasco (BOPV) (População e Sociedade). Some laws appear only in the regional bulletins, others in both, depending on whether the competence is exclusive or shared; the BOE remains, however, the only journal with official legal value for the whole State (População e Sociedade).

Frequently asked questions

What is the Boletín Oficial del Estado? The BOE is the official gazette of Spain, the journal in which Spanish laws, regulations and other acts of compulsory publication appear; under Royal Decree 181/2008 it is the official journal of the Spanish state, and its texts have official and authentic status (População e Sociedade).

How old is the BOE? Its lineage dates to 1661, when the Gazeta nueva de los sucesos políticos y militares appeared in Madrid, but it only became a true official journal in 1762, when the Crown took over printing; the name Boletín Oficial del Estado itself dates to 1936 (População e Sociedade).

When did a law become binding — on approval, or on publication in the BOE? On publication: since 1836, government decrees, orders and instructions have been deemed obligatory from the moment they are published in the gazette, and the 1978 Constitution guarantees the publicity of the norms (Boletín Oficial del Estado; População e Sociedade).

Is the online BOE legally valid? Yes. The electronic edition published on the Agency’s website has been official and authentic since 1 January 2009, protected by an advanced digital signature and by the CVE verification code printed on each provision (Boletín Oficial del Estado).

How can I check whether a printed BOE page is genuine? Enter the CVE, the Electronic Verification Code printed on the page, on the BOE website: it returns the signed electronic original, and a paper copy is official and authentic if it includes the CVE (Boletín Oficial del Estado).

What this profile does not claim

• It does not present 1661 as the founding of an official gazette: the 1661 Gaceta was a private news periodical, and the publication only became a true official journal in 1762.
• It asserts no Sunday publication schedule, which was not verified in a fully-read source.
• It does not treat the 2007–2008 figures for subscriptions, prices, paper costs and daily consultations as current; they are dated figures from a 2008 report.
• It makes no claim about the BOE’s historical gazette archive date range, which was seen only in search snippets, or about the Agency’s current director-general, which was not verified.
• It does not list all 19 regional bulletins in full in the body; the complete list is in the research brief, and three are named as examples.