The statistics for the first quarter confirm what demographers have been explaining for a long time: any increase in the Spanish population in the short or medium term will depend on new migrations given the drop in the birth rate in Spain, where both the number of candidates to be mothers like the fertility rate have been declining for years.
The arrival of foreigners during the first three months of the year has caused the population to increase by 136,916 people and Spain exceeded 48.19 million inhabitants on April 1, the highest figure on record. This is clear from the provisional data of the continuous population statistics (ECP) published yesterday by the INE to provide a provisional estimate of the foreseeable demographic evolution.
The increase in the number of inhabitants by 136,916 people represents a relative annual growth of 1.24%, which suggests that in the year as a whole the population of Spain could increase by 590,184 people, the highest figure since 2008.
The quarterly growth is due to the increase in residents of foreign nationality, which offset the decrease in the population of Spanish nationality. Specifically, the number of foreigners increased by 149,530 people between January and March (75,529 women and 74,001 men), while the number of residents with Spanish nationality fell by 12,614 people.
As of April 1, there were 41,969,601 residents in Spain with Spanish nationality (of them 39,889,196 born in Spain and the rest nationalized) and 6,227,092 of foreign nationality, 2.46% more than at the end of 2022 and a 15.5% more than on April 1, 2021.
In two years, the number of foreign residents has grown by 834,932 people, so that 17.2% of those who live in Spain today were born in another country. However, due to the Spanish nationalization process, the percentage of foreigners out of the population is 12.9%.
The main nationalities of the immigrants who arrived during the first quarter of this year were Colombian (44,300), Moroccan (23,200) and Venezuelan (21,500).
But there were also those who left. The largest number of departures corresponded to Spanish residents: 11,500 emigrated between January and March. The other most numerous emigrant nationalities were Moroccan (8,400) and Romanian (7,700).
With regard to territorial distribution, the INE data indicate that the population grew in 15 of the 17 autonomous communities. The greatest relative increases occurred in the Community of Madrid (0.6% compared to the fourth quarter of 2022), the Valencian Community (0.54%) and Catalonia (0.46%), followed by Murcia and the Balearic Islands, coinciding with the areas where there is the greatest demand for labor. In contrast, the number of inhabitants remained stagnant or fell slightly in Galicia and Extremadura.
On the other hand, and according to the urban indicators that the INE published on Monday, in 2022 the Alicante town of Torrevieja was the city with the highest percentage of foreigners on the census, 40.7% of its population, followed by Fuengirola (Málaga). , with 37.6% of its inhabitants. At the other extreme, the Cádiz towns of San Fernando (1.6%) and Sanlúcar de Barrameda (1.9%) are the ones that registered the lowest proportions of foreign residents.
