First real use case of the DondeGo API: daily event picks for Barcelona and Madrid

Alexander Prokofiev — Mon, 04 May 2026 11:24:36 +0000

We have reached a small but important milestone for DondeGo API.

The first working use case is already live: we are using our API to power daily event selections for two local projects:

The idea is simple: every day, the system uses DondeGo data to select some of the best events happening today in Barcelona and Madrid.

Instead of manually searching across dozens of pages, calendars and sources, we can now use a structured local data layer with events, cities, dates, categories and editorial signals. This makes it much easier to build useful local discovery products.

Why this matters

A local event project usually needs three things:

Fresh event data
A way to filter it by city, date and category
Enough structure to build products on top of it

That is exactly what we are building with DondeGo API.

For our own use case, the API helps us answer questions like:

What is happening in Barcelona today?
What are the most interesting events in Madrid today?
Which events are good enough to recommend?
How can we turn local data into a useful daily feed?

This is still an early version, but it already shows the direction clearly.

DondeGo API is not just a technical experiment. It is becoming a practical content layer for local discovery.

Want to build something with events in Barcelona or Madrid?

If you are building a project about events, culture, local plans, maps, newsletters or city discovery in Barcelona or Madrid, we would be happy to share the data with you for free.

The only thing we ask is simple:
Please link back to DondeGo as the source.

That helps us keep building the project, improve the data and support independent local media.

Possible use cases

You can use DondeGo API to build:

local event newsletters
city guides
interactive maps
Telegram or WhatsApp bots
daily event feeds
cultural recommendation tools
“what to do today” pages
travel and expat guides
niche projects for families, concerts, exhibitions or free events

We are especially interested in small independent projects, local builders and media experiments.

Links

If you want to test the API or build something with local event data for Barcelona or Madrid, feel free to contact us.

We would love to see more projects using structured local data to make city life easier to discover.

We built an API for events, places, and local news in Barcelona and Madrid

Alexander Prokofiev — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 22:34:02 +0000

Building a local API for events, places, and news in Barcelona and Madrid GitHub

Most city products run into the same problem sooner or later.

You want to answer simple questions like:

What is happening today?
What is near these coordinates?
Which places belong to this category?
Which local news is still actually relevant?

But once you start building, local data is rarely clean enough. Events, places, and news often live in separate systems, use different filters, and do not map well to the way people actually explore a city.

That is one of the reasons we started opening up the data layer behind DondeGo.

DondeGo is a local media and city guide focused on Barcelona and Madrid. The editorial side is built around practical discovery: things to do, places to know, and local news that matters in city life. Recently, we have been turning more of that into an API that can be reused in real products.

What the API is trying to solve

The goal is not to build a huge generic directory.

The goal is to make local urban content easier to work with for developers, editorial teams, maps, newsletters, recommendation tools, and city-focused products.

Right now the API is centered around three main object types:

events
places
news

That makes it possible to support workflows like:

showing events happening today in Madrid
finding places within a radius from a point on the map
filtering objects by tags or categories
returning only current news items
building city guides or local recommendation layers

Recent changes in v0.1.0

We have just published v0.1.0, partly because I wanted the project to have a visible public milestone and partly because the API has become much more usable recently.

A few of the changes included in this version:

daily events now also include films
daily events can now return a title override
event and place categories now expose identifiers
filtering by tag slugs is supported via tags
news now supports an actual_only filter for current items
event date serialization now includes:
- start_date
- start_time
- end_date
- end_time
- is_continuous
- is_endless
- is_startless
- schedules
image serialization now includes authorship
it is now possible to fetch only films with free screenings
it is now possible to fetch only places with free events
is_free is now interpreted more strictly
categories for events and places can now be disabled in collection responses

None of this is especially flashy, but it moves the API closer to being something that is genuinely usable in production.

The kind of queries we care about

The API is most useful when it reflects how people actually navigate a city.

For example, a basic daily query:

GET /api/v1/events/?location=madrid&date=hoy

A proximity-based query:

GET /api/v1/events/?lat=40.4168&lon=-3.7038&radius=3000&date=hoy

And place discovery around a point:

GET /api/v1/places/?lat=41.3874&lon=2.1686&radius=2000

That may sound simple, but in practice this is the layer many local products need most.

Not “all possible city data”, but structured answers to questions like:

what can I do today?
what is nearby?
what is free?
what is still current?
what belongs to this area or category?

Why I find local APIs interesting

There are many great APIs in the world, but local discovery still feels oddly underserved.

A lot of the difficulty is not in storing records. It is in making the data useful in the context of a real city. Dates matter. Geography matters. Editorial freshness matters. Category structure matters. Free vs paid matters. Sometimes a simple “today” filter matters more than a complex taxonomy.

That is why I think local APIs are interesting. They sit somewhere between media, maps, structured data, and product design.

If you are building in this space

We are opening access gradually, but if you are working on a project around Barcelona or Madrid and need local events, places, or news, that is what we are building toward.

The public project is here, a bit more context lives there: DondeGo

I would also be curious how other people here would design this kind of API.

Would you prioritize geospatial search first, editorial freshness first, or category and tag structure first?

DEV Community: API for events in Madrid and Barcelona