There will be those who are not very happy with the name, but the Fourth Age is a concept that is imposed by the force of events; Those over 80 are becoming more numerous and their ailments, those of old age, require more and more public resources to attend to their needs.
The Social Action departments closest to the ground know it. In Alicante, a city that tends towards ageing, the latest report from that department has detected that in one of its most central and prosperous neighbourhoods, Ensanche-Diputación, more octogenarians (1,497 people) already reside than those under 15 years of age (1,127). .
With 61.5% of the population aged over 64, this neighborhood is, for Acción Social experts, “paradigm of the aging phenomenon typical of our societies, and has an aging rate of 400%. It is the ideal framework to implement focused strategies, not only in the Third Age, but specific to the Fourth Age”.
While the retired population increases, there are fewer and fewer young people who come to replace those who leave the productive age. “In these cases, the role of the Social Services consists not only in focusing efforts on immediate care for the elderly, but also in alerting them to the sociodemographic situation and implementing, together with the competent departments, policies that encourage young families to establish their residence in these areas, in order to guarantee generational replacement,” the technicians point out.
At the opposite extreme, we find few Alicante neighborhoods where the youth dependency rate exceeds that of older people: San AgustÃn, Garbinet, Virgen del Remedio, Colonia Requena, Virgen del Carmen, Playa de San Juan and Gran VÃa Sur. We continue to find the most extreme cases in Virgen del Carmen and Colonia Requena where around a third of its population is under 15 years of age, while its population of retirement age barely reaches 12%.
These are areas with a high presence of immigrants -half of the census in Colonia Requena- and a low economic level, where the demand for services for minors and young people will be a priority, according to the authors of the report, with special attention to families, need for socio-educational centers… The technicians consider it “urgent to agree on a prevention policy that stops the generational transmission of exclusion in these areas.”
According to the Municipal Register of Inhabitants, on January 1, 2022, Alicante had 350,849 inhabitants. With this contribution of more than 2,000 people, the city has surpassed the number of 350,000 registered people for the first time.
This positive variation of 0.61% is due solely to the contribution of the foreign population (2,202 people representing a variation of 3.67% in the growth of the foreign population) while the interannual variation of the Spanish population has remained negative for five years .
Playa de San Juan, with almost 27,000 residents, is the most populous and fastest growing neighborhood in the city (6.1% compared to 2021, which translates into 1,639 new residents). Other neighborhoods that have experienced increases above 3.5% in 2022 are Juan Pablo II (5.2%), Las Partidas (3.8%) and Ciudad Elegida (3.8%). On the opposite side, the neighborhoods with the greatest population losses have been Virgen del Remedio (from which 229 people have left) and Garbinet (from which 158 have left).
Several neighborhoods stand out whose variation in foreign population growth is above 10% in 2022: Divina Pastora (16.2%), Playa de San Juan (13.4%), San AgustÃn (11.9%), Partidas (11.2%) and John Paul II (10.9%). They are neighborhoods of very different social levels. In areas such as Playa de San Juan and Cabo Huertas, the foreign population from Europe is increasing a lot, while in the more humble areas of the periphery, mostly Latin Americans and Africans settle.
The data confirms a trend already appreciated in 2021: for the second time in a row, the African community is the only one that loses population. The contribution of new inhabitants comes mainly from the European Union, while the municipality has 1,350 fewer African people since 2020.
These data modify the representativeness of each continent in the total population count. Europe continues to be the most represented continent with 43.5% of the foreign population of the municipality, but now it is America that ranks second with 27.7%, compared to 24.1% for the African continent, which has fallen 3 5 points in just two years.
For their part, San Blas (-147 inhab.), Altozano (-142 inhab.) and Florida Baja (-141 inhab.) are the neighborhoods with the greatest loss of Spanish population in absolute terms.
In contrast, Playa San Juan (1014 inhab.), Juan Pablo II (299 inhab.) and Partidas (209 inhab.) have been the areas where the Spanish population has increased its presence to a greater extent. Follow the trend of Spanish families to establish their residence in the most peripheral areas of the city. What the technicians consider “a very significant piece of information when designing and planning the provision of public services and connections, both between the periphery and the center, as well as between the different areas that comprise the municipality.”
