Catalan podcasts: where to listen without ads
It isn't that they don't exist
There are Catalan-language podcasts. Plenty of them, and some are excellent: history, science, local reporting, comedy, long interviews made with time. The catalogue was never the problem.
Getting to it is.
If you have tried searching for one on the big platforms, you know how it goes. You type a word and the search returns whatever is most listened to worldwide first, which is almost never what you were after. The home page offers you the same twenty things it offers everyone. And when you finally land on a show, the algorithm treats it as an anomaly and goes back to recommending the usual.
This isn't bad faith. It's a design consequence: those systems are tuned for volume, not for language. A show with a few thousand loyal listeners in Girona is, to an engine built for global scale, statistical noise. It works exactly as designed. It simply wasn't designed with you in mind.
Searching in Catalan, and actually finding things
We tried to fix the boring half of this problem, which turns out to be the half that annoys people most.
Search ignores accents in both directions. Type "guardia" in a hurry and it still finds "guàrdia". It sounds like a minor detail until you have typed the same title three times on a phone and search keeps insisting there are no results. On the web it returns two things: podcasts, matching inside the title and the description, and individual episodes, those by title.
Search also has a language filter. You can ask it for Catalan results only and stop fighting with it. That isn't a recommendation trick or an algorithmic hunch: it's a language field on each podcast and a filter acting directly on it.
The limit is worth stating plainly: that filter lives on the search page, not on explore. If you want the list filtered by language, the search page is the way.
Catalan is not a late translation
The interface is in Catalan because Catalan is one of the product's three languages — Catalan, Spanish and English — and all three are maintained at once.
That deserves a concrete example, because "multilingual support" is a phrase that means nothing on its own. Catalan is a first-class language of the product, not a layer bolted on at the end: the entire web interface is available in it, and so is the entire mobile app. There is no English-only screen hiding at the bottom of a menu.
The mobile app works the same way: Catalan, Spanish and English, following your phone's language.
And while we're here, radio. Onion Podcasts puts live stations in the same player as podcasts. In the mobile app, the popular stations on the home screen take your languages into account, so with Catalan set, Catalan stations don't end up buried. On the web, the route for browsing is by country and city.
No ads, and no exceptions
We'll keep this short because it already has its own article: there are no pre-roll spots, no mid-roll breaks, and none on podcasts that arrive from another provider's feed either. The reason is simple and it isn't a launch promotion: we don't want to make money from the work of the person making the podcast. The full reasoning is in Why there are no ads on Onion Podcasts.
You don't need an account to listen. Open a podcast and it plays.
Two things carry conditions, and we state them next to the feature rather than in a footnote. Cross-device sync — pause on your phone, carry on at the same second on your laptop — needs a free account, because the position has to be stored on a server somewhere; it's an upgrade, not a toll gate. And downloads for offline listening are in the mobile app only: the web player streams.
If you leave one day, you take it with you
This is the part that makes everything above worth anything, and the part most platforms won't put in writing.
Every podcast hosted here has a public RSS feed. It's an open address, shown on the podcast's own page, that any podcast app in the world can read without asking us and without us needing to know about it. If tomorrow you decide this platform isn't for you, you paste that link into whatever app you pick and keep listening to the show exactly as before. There's nothing to rescue and nobody to ask.
It works in the other direction too: if you already have subscriptions in another app, most of them let you export an OPML file, and you can import it here in one go from settings.
And let's say what is not there, because this is the kind of detail that usually goes unmentioned: today you can't export your subscriptions from here as an OPML file. The individual feeds are open and you can take them one by one, but the export-everything button doesn't exist yet. It should, and when it does we'll say so.
A Catalan catalogue you can only listen to in one place is nobody's victory. A tool you can't leave isn't a tool.
One last thing
Onion Podcasts is new and small, and the catalogue is still growing. If the Catalan podcast you listen to every week isn't here yet, tell us at contact@onionpodcasts.com and we'll add it. That is literally how this list grows.