"Unlike in 1873, when the manufacturing, industrial and urban areas of Barcelona, Valencia (including Alicante) and Madrid predominated, the profile of the new militants in 1882 was strongly Andalusian, with great weight of the agrarian organizations that for a decade they had united in the Union of Rural Workers (UTC), specifically aimed at organizing the agricultural proletariat within the Spanish Federation.”[1] The Congress was held between September 24 and 26, 1882 at the Cervantes Theater in Seville.

The conflict in the Andalusian countryside would put the tensions and differences between the two models to the test.”[5] In the manifesto approved in Congress, the moderate anarcho-collectivist and legalist theses triumphed - it was proclaimed, for example, that strikes "when we cannot necessarily avoid them, we will do them regulation and solidarity" - which was applauded by the liberal press, such as the influential Madrid newspaper El Imparcial which highlighted that "the anarchist workers of Spain" - unlike what was happening in France where "the supporters of anarchy and of collectivism present themselves at their meetings as furious madmen demanding blood and extermination" - "they have just celebrated their annual congress with such correctness in the procedures, so much temperance in the forms and such unanimity in the agreements, that it could well serve as a lesson to many political assemblies of doctors in parliamentary customs".

[6] However, "unanimity" within the FTRE was not such, as demonstrated by the fact that the illegalists shortly after the Seville Congress constituted a new federation under the name of Los Desinheredados.

In their press organ The Social Revolution they denounced years later that the Federal Commission had not published the agreement of the London Congress of 1881 on "propaganda of the deed".

[7] And on the other hand, it was not clear that the authorities and employers were going to tolerate the existence of an anarchist organization that advocated the social revolution.