/elpais/archives/articles

POST /api/elpais/archives/articles

Price: 5 credits

List everything El Pais put out on one calendar day, across all sections or restricted to one, walking the daily archive page by page. Returns headline, standfirst, publication time, byline and linked authors, kicker, thumbnail, the body word count El Pais publishes and its subscription badge.

How to use it

Read one day of the El Pais archive (the site calls it hemeroteca). date is YYYY-MM-DD and the archive reaches back to 1976-05-04, the paper's first issue; any earlier day, or a day in the future, returns 412. section restricts the day to one section, magazine or supplement by slug ('espana', 'deportes', 'babelia'); leave it empty for the whole day. The slug names El Pais's own editorial section, which is wider than the URL segment and has moved over the years: measured on 2018-04-10 the espana filter returns URLs under /politica/ and /ccaa/, and on 1995-03-20 under /madrid/ and /espana/, so a row's section field does not always repeat the slug. The set of valid slugs is the set of sections that existed on that day, so it is much smaller for the 1970s than for today, and an unknown slug returns 412. Set edition to en for english.elpais.com, which has its own daily archive of about 15 entries, no section filter and a single page, or to cd for Cinco Dias. Each entry carries id, article_title, description, web_url, published_at, language, publication, content_type, section, kicker, byline, authors, dateline, has_subscription_badge, has_video, word_count and image; on days before 2023 the archive template prints neither the word count nor the badge. Feed id or web_url into elpais/articles for the body. A day is what El Pais published or re-surfaced on that date, so a few entries carry an earlier published_at. Every entry of a day comes back once, and a whole day runs from about 80 articles in the 1970s to a few hundred today, so a count of a few hundred takes it. A day only days old still gains and loses entries as the newsroom re-surfaces material; days from earlier decades are frozen.

Parameters

• access-token string required

Request body

• timeout integer — Max scrapping execution timeout (in seconds) (default: 300; min: 20; max: 1500)
• date string required — Day of the archive as YYYY-MM-DD; El Pais starts on 1976-05-04 (examples: "2026-08-05", "1976-05-04"; minLength: 1)
• count integer required — Max number of articles to return (min: 1; max: 2000)
• section string — Restrict the day to one El Pais section, magazine or supplement, by its slug; empty means the whole day (default: ""; examples: "", "espana", "deportes")
• edition string — Which title to read: es for elpais.com, en for english.elpais.com, cd for the business daily Cinco Dias (default: "es"; one of: "es", "en", "cd")

Response

• @type string (default: "ElpaisArticleCard")
• id string required
• article_title string required
• description string nullable
• web_url string required
• published_at integer nullable
• language string required
• publication string required
• content_type string required
• section string required
• kicker string nullable
• kicker_url string nullable
• byline string nullable
• authors array (default: [])
  • @type string (default: "ElpaisAuthorRef")
  • name string required
  • alias string nullable
  • profile_url string nullable
  • bio string nullable
  • image string nullable
• dateline string nullable
• has_subscription_badge boolean (default: false)
• has_video boolean (default: false)
• word_count integer nullable
• image string nullable

Errors

• 422 — Malformed date or section slug Check the fields against this schema. A URN with the wrong prefix is the most common cause.
• 408 — The request ran past its time limit Raise `timeout` in the request body, up to the maximum this endpoint documents. Lowering `count` or turning off the `with_*` flags also helps, because less work finishes sooner.
• 412 — No El Pais archive for this day, or unknown section slug Retrying will not help: either the entity does not exist, or the input points at a different one.
• 429 — Too many requests: a rate limit or a usage window is exhausted When the response carries an X-Retry-After header, wait that many seconds and retry: the same number is in the body as `detail.retry_after`, and the limit clears once that window passes. The message in the body names the limit that was hit.
• 500 — Something broke on our side Retrying will not help. If it keeps happening, send us the X-Request-ID from the response headers.
• 529 — Rate limit reached, or the endpoint is overloaded Wait at least 30 seconds, then retry.

Response headers

• X-Error — Error message text (present only on error)
• X-Request-ID — Unique request identifier
• X-Execution-Time — Execution time in seconds
• X-Result-Count — How many records the body carries. 0 means an empty result, which is a normal answer and not by itself an error. A non-zero count can come back together with X-Error when the failure happened partway through — read this header and X-Error independently.
• X-Total-Available-Results — How many records exist for this query, when the endpoint can say. On a `dry_run` request this is the answer and the body is empty. It saturates: the endpoint's documented maximum means 'at least that many', any smaller number is exact.
• X-Warning — Present when the request body carried keys this endpoint does not document. They were ignored, so any filter you meant to apply through them did not apply. Check the spelling against this schema and retry.
• X-Retry-After — Seconds to wait before retrying. Present only on 429.