The main Spanish local entity above municipalities is, currently, the province, whose primary function is to support the smaller municipalities that are often unable to provide the services that their inhabitants require. The lack of efficiency shown, in general, by the provincial institution as a local entity, and the need to create a more efficient autonomous territorial organization, has led the autonomous communities to implement other types of entity between municipality and province: some of top-downkind -comarca(county), functional areas or metropolitan areas- and others of bottom-up type -municipal associations or municipal consortiums. These entities have diverse functions, depending on the autonomous community (decentralization, planning, local development), that usually compete with those of the province. In Comunitat Valenciana, top-down delimitations have not been feasible, for the time being, with regard to regionalization(comarca), but they have been in terms of the metropolitan area. On the other hand, many bottom-up demarcations have been developed. To combine both types of demarcation, in 2018 a new Valencian municipal association law was presented that promotes a mixed model: classic bottom-up municipal associations alongside comarca associations (voluntary but adapted to a top-down scheme)