The provisional data provided by the National Institute of Statistics (INE) on babies born last year confirm what demographers have been predicting for some time: that the Spanish birth rate is not only at a minimum, but continues to fall. It is estimated that in 2023 there were a total of 322,075 births in Spain, the lowest figure in the INE’s historical series, which begins in 1941. The decline is 2% on the previous year and more than 24% compared to 2013. In other words, three quarters of the babies born a decade ago are born. The reason was pointed out a few months ago, in an interview with this newspaper, by the director of the Institute of Economics, Geography and Demography of the CSIC, Diego Ramiro: “Those who should be today’s grandmothers had few offspring , and their daughters, in addition to being few, also have very low fertility, so the number of births will continue to decline, and not so much because of what is being done now but because of what happened decades ago”.
And the fall is more pronounced in some territories than in others. In Melilla and Ceuta, 19% and 12% fewer babies were born than in 2022. The decline was also more than 10% in Castilla-La Mancha, 9% in La Rioja, 5% in Castilla y León and Navarre, more than 4% in Aragon and 3.3% in Catalonia. Only in Madrid and Extremadura were more babies born than a year earlier.
The decrease in the number of births has been accompanied by a delay in the age of motherhood in recent years. Evidence of this is that the number of babies born to mothers over 40 has grown by 19.3% since 2013, and last year they were 11% of all births. And if we look at those of mothers over 50, which grew by 12% last year, they have more than tripled in a decade: from 82 in 2013 to 288 last year. On the contrary, there are fewer and fewer mothers under the age of 25 (they represent 9.4% of maternity homes and have decreased by 26% since 2013).
INE estimates indicate that the number of deaths also decreased last year: 435,331 people died, 5.8% less than in 2022. Mortality only increased among children under 4 (a 1.7%), and it decreased by almost 11% among people aged 85-89 and by more than 6% among those over 90. With these figures, the vegetative balance of the Spanish population returned to negative (- 113,256 people) in 2023. The biggest differences between births and deaths were recorded in (-18,701), Castile and León (-16,270), Andalusia (-13,544) and Catalonia (-13,384). On the other hand, Madrid recorded a natural population increase of 4,770 people.
