Barcelona, Girona, Lleida and Tarragona are the provincial capitals with the highest percentage of foreigners

More than half of Barcelona residents were not born in Barcelona. In fact, more than 30% were not even born in Spain, according to the 2023 municipal census prepared by Barcelona City Council. Barcelona is also the provincial capital with the highest proportion of foreigners in Spain. In 2022, 22% of its inhabitants did not have Spanish nationality, according to the National Statistics Institute (INE). Afterwards they are Girona (20.7%), Lleida (20.7%), Tarragona (18.4%), Palma (16.6%), Castelló de la Plana (16.8%), Madrid (15.6 %), Alicante (15%), Valencia (14.4%) and Guadalajara (14.2%). Both Barcelona, which leads the ranking, and most of those that follow, with the exception of Madrid and Guadalajara, have something in common: they are in the northeast of the peninsula and exceed the national proportion (11.7%).

Despite having similar percentages, the profile of foreigners in each city is not homogeneous and in each case it is due to different realities with different countries of origin. Clara Cortina, professor in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, warns that “there are many immigrants who arrived 20 years ago and who have already acquired Spanish nationality and who no longer appear as foreigners”. In this same sense, European foreigners “rarely acquire Spanish nationality, because they do not need it”. Cortina explains that, for example, even though there are more foreigners in Alicante than in Madrid, “it does not mean that there is more immigration, but it is a migration of another origin”. Thus, the motivation for coming to Spain is different: “not work, but more related to retirement, leisure”.

Apart from provincial capitals, among all the cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants in Spain, the five with the highest proportion of foreigners are Roquetas de Mar (Almería, 28.7%), Marbella (Málaga, 27.3%), L’Hospitalet de Llobregat (Barcelona, 21.9%), Parla (Madrid, 21.8%) and Santa Coloma de Gramenet (Barcelona, 21.6%). Going down to those with more than 10,000 inhabitants, the five cities with the highest proportion of foreigners are Rojales (68.6%), Teulada (54.5%), Alfàs del Pi (51.4%), Calpe (49.2 %), all in Alicante; and Adeje (Tenerife, 47.3%). Torre del Burgo (Guadalajara, 88.6%), with 474 inhabitants, is the municipality in Spain with the highest percentage of foreigners, mostly Bulgarians. In this municipality, Vox won the general elections of 2019 and confirmed the victory in those of 2023.

The distribution of the foreign population in Spain is due to multiple factors. Apart from historical issues, the accumulation of high percentages of foreigners in certain areas of the country “coincides with the areas of most economic activity”, according to Carles Bertran, director of the Centro de Información para Trabajadores Extranjeros (CITE) of Comisiones Obreras (CCOO). In addition, when migrant groups settle in a place, they act as a point of attraction for their compatriots.

The INE obtains its data from the municipal registers of the City Councils, where citizens, in order to be registered, must provide their nationality in a mandatory manner. “In the case of Spaniards, it is established that the document certifying identity is the Documento Nacional de Identidad (DNI)”, according to the INE. “It is to be expected that citizens who have at least two nationalities, one of them being Spanish, identify themselves as Spanish by means of the DNI”. In this sense, the term “Spanish”, according to the body, refers to people who have Spanish nationality “regardless of whether they may have any other nationality”. Likewise, “except in exceptional cases”, the term “foreigner” includes “those persons who, having one or more nationalities, none of them Spanish”.

Comparing these data with those of other European cities is complicated, since the available data with identical parameters are limited. Eurostat, the European Statistical Office, has a database on the proportion of foreigners and the proportion of foreign-born inhabitants in several European cities. However, there is no European legislation that obliges the collection of this data. In this sense, the figures are not available for all cities nor updated in all years. Going to the town halls of each city it is possible to make a somewhat more rudimentary comparison.

The proportion of foreigners in Barcelona does not exceed that of capitals such as Berlin (24.3%), but it does so with others such as Paris (15%). Germany considers people with “unclear” foreign nationality and stateless persons to be foreigners. Similarly, according to this institution, if a person has a nationality other than German, it is counted as German. France considers a person who “does not have French nationality” to be a foreigner. .