The Spanish population ages without pause. According to data from the latest census, which the INE published today, one in five inhabitants is at least 65 years old. And while the population over 64 years of age grew by 2.1% in the last year, that of those under 16 years of age decreased by 0.6%. The result is that there are already more than two and a half million more people of retirement age than children and adolescents.
The relative weight of people aged 65 and over in the population as a whole has doubled since 1975, going from representing 10.2% to 20.1%.
The resident population in Spain on January 1, 2023 was 48,085,361 inhabitants, which represents a growth of almost 600,000 people compared to the same date in 2022, according to the new annual update population censuses that the INE.
This reflects, in addition to aging, the growing multiculturalism of Spanish society: 17.1% of residents were born outside of Spain and 13% of the population has foreign nationality.
The most numerous foreigners on January 1 were Moroccans (893,953), followed by Romanians (629,755), Colombians (453,911), Italians (301,791), British (284,037) and Venezuelans (278,159).
However, in the last year the largest increases have occurred among citizens from Colombia, Ukraine and Venezuela, while the number of residents from Romania, the United Kingdom and Bulgaria has decreased.
Census data also reflect the growing depopulation of rural areas and small towns: 40% of the population is concentrated in municipalities with more than 100,000 inhabitants and only 3% live in those with less than a thousand inhabitants.
And although mobility increases, 44% of the population still resides in the same municipality in which they were born, 22% have moved to another in the same province, 3.4% have changed provinces within the same community autonomous and 13.5% live in a community other than the one where they were born.
During 2022, the population increased almost universally in all the autonomous communities except in Extremadura, where it decreased by 2,502 people. The largest increases occurred in Catalunya (140,140 more people), Comunidad de Madrid (128,649 more) and Comunitat Valenciana (108,079 more).
And when the focus is on the cities, it is striking that those that grew the most were coastal and tourist towns such as Torrevieja (6.8%), Estepona (4.6%) and Benidorm (4.3%). On the contrary, the greatest decreases were recorded in Linares, Cádiz and Puertollano.