Number density distribution of (top panel) and (bottom panel) galaxies at 0.55 ≤ z< 0.85 from the 48 ALHAMBRA subfields. The star and the black bar mark the median and the intrinsic dispersion retrieved by the MLE, respectively. The red solid line shows the best MLE solution convolved with the observational errors and it is independent of the histogram binning. The derived relative cosmic variance σ_v is labelled in the panels. A colour version of this plot is available in the electronic edition.