How a Rule Gets Published
This site publishes legal information, so an invented or misattributed figure is not a cosmetic bug — it is the whole product failing. These are the rules it follows, and what its numbers do and do not mean.
- 120 European cities
- One file per city, one per country. Nothing is generated.
- 63 official citations
- Every national rule names the gazette or authority it was read from, and the build refuses any other kind of source.
- A date on every page
- Each city page shows when its sources were last read, rather than when the file was last edited.
Where a figure has to come from
Three kinds of source are admissible: the primary legal text, the official gazette, or the competent authority’s own site. An official press release counts for enforcement data — how many fines were issued, when a law took effect — and never for an amount.
General press, travel blogs, forums, aggregators, other fines sites and a writer’s own recollection are not sources. A newspaper report is a lead to go and find the law, never the citation itself. That rule was written down early and then broken five times in one week of research, which is why it is now a script that runs on every build: a citation to a commercial legal database or a press site fails the build rather than reaching a page.
And nothing is invented — not an amount, not a date, not an article number, not a URL, not even as a placeholder while a layout is being tested. Where a figure cannot be traced, the rule is published without one, saying what is actually known: that the conduct is prohibited, and what happens instead.
Which authority wrote it
Almost every serious error found on this site came from confusing three things that look identical on a page and are not:
National, one amount
One statute, one figure, the same in every city. Germany’s €60 fare-evasion penalty is federal, so it is written once on the country page and the cities inherit it instead of repeating it.
National, priced by region
One offence, different amounts by region. Balconing is prosecuted nationwide in Spain but priced by autonomous community, so inheriting a single figure would print the Balearic number on the Barcelona page.
Municipal
A town’s own ordinance, capped by national law. A Spanish council cannot exceed €3,000 whatever it writes, and a figure above that is either national law or wrong.
What the numbers mean
A range, not a price
Fines are shown as the range the law sets, because that is what the law sets. The single figure in a page’s badge is the highest amount on that page we stand behind — not what a first offence costs, which is usually near the bottom of the range.
A ceiling is not a tariff
The commonest error in this field, and it was on most of these pages: publishing the maximum an authority is permitted to charge as though it were the amount charged. Spain’s €3,000, Poland’s 500 zł and Croatia’s €700 all travelled that way. Where a figure sits suspiciously on a band boundary, the page says so.
Colour is severity, never cost
The marker beside a rule says how serious the offence is. A large fine in a minor band and a small one in a serious band are both ordinary, so colour would be misleading if it tracked the amount.
Stored in the currency of the law
A Czech fine is set in koruna and is stored in koruna. Euro equivalents exist only to order lists across currencies, and they move with the exchange rate while the law does not.
Who actually pays
Some of the largest figures in circulation are the operator’s liability, not yours — the €60,000 attached to Balearic party rules falls on the establishment, and the guest is expelled instead. Those amounts are marked and are kept out of every headline figure.
What this site is not
Not legal advice
It is information about published rules. It is not advice about your situation, and it does not create any professional relationship.
Not a substitute for local signage
A sign at the beach or the station is the authority for that place on that day, and it beats anything written here.
Not exhaustive
A city page covers the rules a visitor is likely to meet, not every provision that could theoretically be applied to them. An absence here is not permission.
Not live
Rules change between the date a page was last checked and the day you read it, and that date is on every page for exactly that reason. There is deliberately no “not checked in X months” banner: with pages edited by hand, such a banner would mark almost the whole site as suspect while saying nothing about whether any particular figure is wrong.
Not a strictness ranking
Cities are not scored against each other. Doing it properly would need enforcement rates, which no European authority publishes; doing it with the data available measures how much research a city has had here rather than how strict it is.
Found something wrong? Tell us
Corrections are the most useful thing anyone sends. Every figure checked against its source in the first pass of this project turned out to need changing, so the assumption here is that more of them are still wrong rather than that they are finished.
What makes a correction actionable, in one line each: the city and the rule, and the instrument that contradicts it — the article, the gazette reference or the authority’s own page. A link to the law beats a long explanation, and it is the only thing that can change what is published.
corrections@skipthefine.comAffiliate disclosure
Some pages carry one affiliate link, and a booking made through it may earn this site a commission at no extra cost to you. There is at most one such block per page, it is never placed between rules, and it has no bearing on what is published: no rule, figure or citation on this site is chosen, worded or omitted because of it. There is no advertising, no sponsored content and no paid placement of any city.