Comment 1 for bug 6315

At the moment, there's fundamentally no facility for a man page to declare its encoding other than by its location in the filesystem; putting UTF-8 Spanish man pages in /usr/share/man/es_ES.UTF-8/... *should* work, but it's really only peripherally supported at the moment and I'm not sure it'll do the right thing for all user locales.

Yes, man-db expects Spanish man pages to be encoded in ISO-8859-1. For now, I think the right thing to do would indeed be to recode them.