04.06.09 - 09:28 -
Spain's population grew by 500,000 in the past year to 46,661,950, with the foreign-born accounting for 12 per cent of the total.
Preliminary official registry figures, which were released on Wednesday by the National Statistics Institute, show that 329,929 foreign-born people and 174,199 Spaniards were added to the population during the period.
The increase in the foreign-born population, however, fell by nearly half from the 600,000 to 750,000 annual figure posted in recent years.
In recent years, the booming economy drew hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Latin America, Morocco and Eastern Europe to Spain.
Spain's economy is officially in a recession for the first time since 1993, and millions of jobs have been lost, especially in construction, services and agriculture, all industries that employed large numbers of immigrants during the boom.
