The last year has seen the biggest population growth in 14 years, but it is all due to immigration. Residents with Spanish nationality have fallen by 13,000 and those born in Spain by 101,000.
Spain has experienced in the last year the highest population growth in the last 14 years, with nearly 600,000 more inhabitants at the end of this first quarter than at the same time in 2022. As a result, it started the year with 48 million inhabitants, a record number that is growing every month and now stands at around 48.2 million. However, it is not Spaniards but foreigners who are responsible for this increase.
After the Covid-19 disaster, which caused the number of people with Spanish nationality to fall by almost 100,000, this part of the population has hardly changed and remains at 41.9 million. Before the pandemic, this figure had also been ‘stagnant’ for years, with the same number of Spanish residents in 2019 as in 2016.
In contrast, the number of foreigners living in our country continues to grow. For the first time in the historical series, the resident population in Spain with foreign nationality exceeded 6 million people at the beginning of the year and the figure now stands at 6.3 million, according to data from the National Statistics Institute (INE).
In the last year alone, between April last year and this year, the population with foreign nationality has grown by 604,000 people, while there are 13,000 fewer inhabitants with Spanish nationality. The difference between the two variations results in a positive balance of 590,000 inhabitants in Spain.
