The European population ages and the Spanish population does so by leaps and bounds. According to figures published by Eurostat, half of the inhabitants of the European Union are over 44.5 years old, which means that the average age of the population has increased by 2.3 years in the last decade, since in 2013 it was of 42.2.
But in the case of the Spanish population, this increase has been four years, which places Spain as the second country – along with Greece, Slovakia and Italy – that has aged the most in the last ten years, only surpassed by Portugal. , where the average age has risen 4.4 years.
However, Spain is not the oldest European society. Half of the population is over 44.2 years old, an age lower than the community average and far from the 48.4 years of Italy, which has the oldest population in the EU, followed by Portugal, Bulgaria, Greece, Croatia and Germany.
Italy, Greece and Germany are also the countries with the highest proportion of people over 80 years of age: all of them above 7%, while Spain is within the community average, which is 6%. And if the focus is on the group of people over 65 years of age, in Spain they represent 20.1% of the population, below the 21.3% European average but 2.4 percentage points more than a decade ago.
In this period, the increase in the number of older people has run parallel to the reduction in the number of children and adolescents. Only 13.6% of the Spanish population is under 15 years old, while in 2013 it was 15.2. With this evolution, the dependency ratio, understood as the ratio of the volume of children and the elderly to the population of working age, stood at 50.9% last year in Spain and 56.7% on average. community.
Today, provisional data on the population of Spain as of January 1 of this year have also been made public, which with 48,592,909 inhabitants represents the maximum value of the entire INE historical series.
The number of residents increased by 507,548 people in the last year due almost entirely to the arrival of foreigners. People born in another country (a total of 8,775,213) already represent 18% of the population of Spain. However, the number of foreign residents is lower (6.5 million) due to the processes of acquiring Spanish nationality.
During 2023, the population grew in all the autonomous communities except Extremadura, but it did so very unevenly. The Valencian Community (1.9%), Madrid (1.87%), the Balearic Islands (1.7%) and Catalonia (1.5%) grew well above the average (1%). Murcia and the Canary Islands also surpassed the average, while the rest were below and Galicia (0.24%), Castilla y León (0.26%) and Asturias (0.27%) were the ones that gained the least population.
