A growing number of studies examine how citizens in rural and urban areas differ in their preferences and attitudes on several political topics. For instance, Huijsmans et al. (2021) find that urban residents have become more cosmopolitan over the last decades, whereas rural residents have remained the same. However, we know little about whether urban and rural populations differ in the policy problems they view as most important, with current studies circumscribed to the US case (Yildirim and Solvig, 2025). This paper offers a threefold contribution to this nascent literature. First, we explore the rural-urban divide regarding the most important problem in the European context. Specifically, we use more than 300 quarterly surveys containing the most important problem question from the Spanish Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas between 1996 and 2025, which have been merged and CAP-coded. Second, unlike previous studies that focus on a dichotomous classification of urban and rural areas, we examine a more fine-grained classification that considers local communities of different sizes. Third, we explore whether the previous results are driven by compositional effects arising from the different occupational composition of rural and urban areas in Spain, with the latter more likely to be occupied by sociocultural professionals with distinct policy preferences.