The statistics of 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 that Spain is experiencing, where both the number of candidates to become mothers and the fertility rate has been on the decline for years.
The arrival of foreigners in the first three months of the year has caused the population to increase by 136,916 people and for Spain to exceed 48.19 million inhabitants on April 1st, the highest number 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 on the foreseeable demographic evolution.
The increase in the number of inhabitants by 136,916 people represents a relative annual growth of 1.24%, which means that in the whole year the population of Spain could increase by 590,184 people, the most elevated since 2008.
The quarterly growth is due to the increase in residents of foreign nationality, which compensated for 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 decreased by 12,614.
On the first day of April, there were 41,969,601 residents in Spain with Spanish nationality (30,889,196 born in Spain, and the rest, naturalized) and 6,227,092 of foreign nationality, 2.46% more than when it ended in 2022 and 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 living in Spain today were born in another country. However, due to the processes of Spanish nationalization, the percentage of foreigners in the population is 12.9%.
The main nationalities of immigrants who arrived in the first quarter of this year were Colombian (44,300), Moroccan (23,200) and Venezuelan (21,500).
Most of the 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).
In terms of territorial distribution, INE data indicate that the population grew in 15 of the 17 autonomous communities. The most important relative increases were registered in the Community of Madrid (0.6% compared to the fourth quarter of 2022), the Community of Valencia (0.54%) and Catalonia (0.46%), followed by Murcia and the Balearic Islands , coinciding with the areas where there is more demand for labour. Conversely, the number of inhabitants remained stagnant or slightly reduced 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 Torrevella was the city with the highest percentage of foreigners in 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%) recorded the lowest proportions of foreign residents.