Spain adds one million inhabitants in just two years thanks to immigration

The arrival of foreigners into the country has triggered one of the highest post-pandemic population spikes this century and the non-Spanish now account for almost one in five residents

Alfonso Torices

Thursday, 8 August 2024, 19:09

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Spain's population has increased by just over one million people in just two years, a rate of growth almost unheard of since the early years of this century when the country was in the midst of a strong economic boom and was a magnet for the outside world to come live here.

On 1 July last year there were 48,797,875 registered residents in Spain, 67,367 more than in the first quarter of 2023, which is a new all-time high, according to data from the Continuous Population Statistics (CPS), released today by the National Statistics Institute (INE). These figures already make it feasible to predict that the 49 million inhabitants target will be breached by next spring.

The reason for the increase needs no debate. It is exclusively due to the very strong influx of foreigners, especially since the summer of 2022, coinciding with a remarkable economic recovery and employment boost after the dramatic economic and social crisis unleashed by the coronavirus pandemic.

Immigration is alleviating the current demographic 'winter' for the Spanish-born section of the population. In fact, in the last five years it has become the norm for there to be more deaths than births among Spaniards. At best there are some quarters where the ratio of deaths to births has stagnated. Nevertheless, with repeated and habitual population declines, we can only expect this downward trend to be increasingly aggravated by the progressive ageing of the native population.

The last large wave of immigration began between spring and summer 2022, coinciding with the general vaccination programme being underway by then and a much better control of covid waves. Arrivals peaked between October of that year and January 2023. Since then, the Spanish population has grown by more than 1% year-on-year for seven consecutive quarters and the foreign population has grown by almost 2% in twelve months.

Signs of slowdown

The pace of overseas arrivals remains high today, but mass immigration has started to slow down since the beginning of the year. It has gone from 592,722 new residents registered in Spain in a single year (from July 2022 to July 2023) to 415,369 getting registered on the census in the last twelve months. This means that the rate of population growth has gone from 1.3% up year-on-year over those 18 months to the current figure of just under 0.9%.

Despite the slowdown, the volume of immigration that Spain still experiences is high. In the last quarter alone, for which numbers are available, almost 90,000 foreigners have arrived. The result of this growth trend over the last two decades is that last month Spanish residents born in other countries exceeded nine million people for the first time in history, meaning that they now account for 18.5% of the registered population of Spain. Soon, in one or two years' time, they will account for one in five of Spain's inhabitants.

The main countries of origin for this new wave of migration are practically the same quarter after quarter. At the top of the list are Colombia bringing in 36,900 new residents between April and June, Morocco with 25,100 new arrivals, Venezuela, with 21,400 and Peru with 15,200. Much further down the list are Italy, as the leading European nation with 10,300 arrivals, followed by Argentina, Ukraine, Honduras and Paraguay.

Which regions appeal the most?

The Spanish population census is growing across the board, but the increase is not uniform. The population increased in the second quarter of the year in only 12 of the 17 autonomous regions that make up Spain. Only Extremadura, Andalucía and Castile and Leon showed decreases and Aragon and Galicia remained the same. The regions with the greatest growth are also practically the same in each statistical quarterly check. The four largest recipients are the Community of Madrid, Valencia, the Balearic Islands and Catalonia. The first three doubled the rate of arrivals of the national average from April to June. La Rioja has also joined this leading group in the last quarter.

In parallel with the increase in the number of residents, there has been a continuous increase in the number of registered households in the country. As of 1 July, there were almost 19.4 million, with 23,731 new households on the books.

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