The Esri Spain 2026 conference, the largest annual meeting on geospatial technology in our country, will be held on September 30 and October 1 at IFEMA, Madrid. Organized by Esri Spain, it will bring together more than 2,000 professionals around 150 presentations, 200 projects and 20 simultaneous sessions, consolidating itself as the meeting point of the geospatial community through real experiences and success stories.
Under the motto “GIS, creating a smarter world”, this edition will revolve around three main axes: Geographic Information Systems, which convert the science of “where” into coordinated decisions; Living Digital Twins, which not only reproduce infrastructures and territories, but also monitor them, analyze patterns, and warn of what is happening, and Geospatial Artificial Intelligence, which combines AI and geographic context to analyze large volumes of data and anticipate scenarios.
During the plenary session, entities such as ACCIONA and Eiffage, Fuenlabrada City Council and EDP will present real cases: from the construction of a highly complex urban infrastructure, GIS as a new operating system for urban decision-making, to the creation of a platform designed to connect people, data and decisions at a global level.
MADRING: GIS as a key tool
The Madrid Formula 1 Circuit has been a highly demanding project within the construction sector in an urban space, located in an area of the city where daily activity, international events and large infrastructure coexist. The challenge was twofold: to execute a work of enormous complexity and precision without interrupting the life of the environment and to do so under strict environmental criteria.
To address this, ACCIONA and Eiffage implemented ArcGIS as a corporate technology platform. The GIS thus became the backbone of the large volumes of information contemplated by the project, unifying technical, environmental and construction data in a single geospatial context accessible to all teams, with the aim of improving coordination, control and decision-making throughout the life cycle of the infrastructure.
One of the key elements has been the capture of reality using drones. Periodic flights have provided high-resolution images that, processed by photogrammetry, generate orthomosaics, elevation models and precise 3D models, allowing ground movements to be followed, cut and fill volumes to be analyzed, and continuous comparison of what was executed with the planned design.
Geospatial inventory of trees
At the environmental level, ArcGIS has made possible a geospatial inventory of the affected trees, with each tree located and labeled according to its status and destination, as well as dashboards that provide traceability and transparency to decisions. In addition, the platform has been the basis for the BIM + GIS integration, which has provided territorial context to the engineering models, detecting interferences between what was designed and what was built and has given shape to a living digital twin that has grown as the work progressed.
This project has consolidated GIS as an essential technology to build smart infrastructures and AEC projects that are more efficient, sustainable and aligned with the demands of urban development and large events.
Living digital twins: the operating system to understand and manage the territory of Fuenlabrada with geospatial artificial intelligence Fuenlabrada City Council will present in the plenary session how GIS has become its new operating system to understand and manage the city, incorporating geospatial artificial intelligence through Fuenlabrada Lab to convert information into smarter decisions.
The municipality needed to implement its Low Emissions Zone (ZBE) in a context of growing regulatory demands, but its information was dispersed in multiple systems and the existing geoportal did not allow evaluating the impact of the measure, understanding mobility patterns or bringing the data closer to technicians and citizens.
Corporate platform based on ArcGIS
The answer has been an ArcGIS-based enterprise platform that integrates geospatial data, analytics tools, and intelligent applications. The development includes a living digital twin that centralizes data from the control system and combines it with other sources (traffic, public transport or noise) to offer a global and coherent vision of the city. By incorporating artificial intelligence through Fuenlabrada Lab, the city is building a new way of understanding and managing its urban reality. The combination of GIS, Living Digital Twins and geospatial artificial intelligence makes it possible to transform data into knowledge and knowledge into smarter decisions to improve people’s lives.
The result is a unified and updated vision of the municipality, a better understanding of mobility, a greater capacity to evaluate the impact of the ZBE and a solid foundation on which to incorporate advanced analytics, with a clear drive for transparency and communication with citizens.
Thanks to the implementation of living digital twins, these localities can analyze their territory in real time
The Fuenlabrada project is not an isolated case. Digital twins such as those developed in San Bartolomé de Tirajana, Seville or Fuengirola have shown that this technology is essential for a better understanding of urban life in any municipality. In this sense, thanks to the implementation of living digital twins, these localities can analyze their territory in real time, improve tourism planning, optimize the management of their services and promote the development of Smart Cities.
Urban planning and development
Geographic data has become the engine of organizational intelligence and AI has taken GIS one step further, evolving from analysis to action. These capabilities translate into smarter management of urban planning and development, critical infrastructure, energy transition, environmental and climate sustainability, economic development systems, data governance, or education and research.
All this and much more will be topics of debate and exhibition on September 30 and October 1 at the Esri Spain Conference, which will take place at IFEMA, Madrid.
