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LIFE IN SPAIN

More foreigners and people living alone: What Spain will be like in the future

Within three decades, new data reveals that there will continue to be more deaths than births in Spain, population growth will be mainly due to immigration and a third of all households will be occupied by a single person.

Published: 25 June 2024 10:39 CEST
More foreigners and people living alone: What Spain will be like in the future
An ageing population and more foreigners: Spain of the future. Photo: Alex Moliski / Pexels

Spain’s National Statistics Institute (INE) has released a report revealing what the country will look like all the way up to 2074. The figures have been based on how the population will evolve if current demographic trends continue.

Spain’s population will grow by five million

Spain currently has 48,692,804 inhabitants, but this number is set to grow by an extra 5 million by 2039. It’s important to note that the growth will not be equal across the country, and will only focus on specific areas. Much of the country will continue to suffer from depopulation.

Catalonia and Madrid will be the two regions with the greatest growth, with nearly 1.2 million and one million respectively. The greatest relative increases, however, will be recorded in the Balearic Islands (19.0 percent), Valencia (19 percent ) and Murcia (17.2 percent).

On the other hand, the steepest declines will be seen in Asturias (-4.1 percent), Extremadura (-3.4 percent) and Castilla y León (-0.7 percent).

READ ALSO: Growing number of foreigners drives Spain’s population rise

28 percent of the population will be over 65

Spain’s population is growing older and older, and by 2042, 28 percent will be over age 65 compared to the current 20.4 percent. Fast forward to 2055, and this will reach 30.5 percent.

Six percent of the population of Spain has already turned 80, but in 2074 this will double, reaching 12.3 percent. And within 15 years the number of even older people will practically triple. Centenarians will exceed 46,000 compared to nearly 17,000 this year.

Birthrates will increase

Spain’s birthrate has been in decline over recent years, but starting this year, it will begin to grow until 2042. The data predicts that 5.5 million children will be born in the next 15 years,  and the average number of children per woman will grow slightly, going from 1.16 registered this year to 1.24 in 2038.

In 2042, birthrates will begin to fall again, but from 2058 they will rise once more, due to more people having reached fertile ages. The number of births is also thought to be boosted by immigration, with more and more foreigners moving here and having children too.

But, the 5.5 million babies predicted to be born here between 2024 and 2038, will still be 8.7 less than those born in the previous 15 years.

Over a quarter of the population will have been born outside Spain

Spain’s population will not only grow thanks to increasing birthrates but more so because of the numbers of foreigners continuing to move here.

By 2039, the INE predicts that a total of 28.7 percent of the people living in Spain will have been born outside of the country. And by 2074 that figure will reach 39 percent.

This means the population born in Spain is set to gradually decrease, going from 81.9 percent today to 61 percent within 50 years.

READ ALSO: Spain needs 25 million foreign workers to keep its pensions afloat

7.7 million will live alone

It seems that Spaniards are increasingly choosing to live or will be forced to live on their own, with stats revealing that by 2039, one-third of households in the country will only be occupied by a single person.

This equates to 7.7 million single-person homes, compared to the current 5.4 million. In fact, in 2039 the most common type of household will be that of a single person – 33.5 percent of the total, ahead of the 31 percent of two-person households.  

For members

ELECTRICITY

How would Spain react if there was a major blackout?

Doomsday series and fake news have made the prospect of a national and Europe-wide outage seem outlandish, and yet we come close to such a critical event. How would Spanish authorities react if there was a days-long power cut?

Published: 28 June 2024 12:48 CEST
How would Spain react if there was a major blackout?

In January, 2021, a technical fault at an electricity plant in Croatia almost knocked out Europe’s entire power grid.

In 2003, 56 million people were left without electricity for several hours in Italy and Switzerland, but there have been outages that have affected far more people and lasted longer, such as the 2012 India blackouts that cut off the supply of electricity for two days to 620 million people. 

Even the entire island of Tenerife in Spain’s Canary Islands has been hit by two major outages in recent years.

Sri Lanka, Turkey, Zanzibar, Brazil, Pakistan, Venezuela – there are countless other blackouts over the past two decades caused by software errors, network overloads, accidents and adverse weather conditions. 

Most feared of all is the prospect of a solar storm so powerful that the grid couldn’t be restored within a matter of hours, days or weeks. 

Such an apocalyptic scenario was depicted in the 2022 Movistar+ series Apagón (Blackout in English), which follows several people in Spain as they survive in a world without electricity.

The prospect of a solar storm setting us back two centuries seems far-fetched and has been exploited and overblown by fake news sources.

A geomagnetic storm caused by a solar storm did cause a nine-hour outage in Quebec in 1989, meaning that it isn’t impossible but by no means as permanent a blackout as some doomsdayers fear. 

However, as the Covid-19 pandemic taught us, even the most unfathomable can sometimes become reality.

So what if this scenario were to hit Spain or the world as a whole?

Spain’s Environment Teresa Ribera flatly ruled out that this could affect Spain and defended that “we can rule it out from our future concerns” despite the fact that Europe’s electricity grid is linked from London all the way to Istanbul.

According to Ribera, the Spanish energy system “is almost an energy island and as we have almost double the installed power than what we use, the risk of a type of blackout due to a system failure in third countries is very limited”.

Madrid authorities are not so convinced by the national government’s stance, and in 2021 called for a nationwide action plan ready to be executed jointly across the regions in the event of a major blackout. 

In 2017, the Spanish Association of Civil Protection for Spatial Weather filed in the Spanish Congress a request to develop a national ‘anti-solar blackout’ plan but this somewhat bizarrely got passed on to the agricultural department and forgotten about. 

They ended up drawing up their own report studying what could be done in all manner of scenarios: accidents at power generation plants, scarcity of essential supplies (food, water, fuel and electricity), and meteorological events. 

After the freak snow storm that brought the Spanish capital to a standstill for several days that very year, it comes as no surprise that Madrid authorities want to be prepared in future.

Protocol measures went from establishing shelters, to a hierarchy of importance in terms of essential services and infrastructure, from the fire service to hospitals.

Specific recommendations for citizens included stocking up on electric generators, batteries, candles, analogue radio receivers and basic foods that do not require cold storage.

But the truth remains that there is no handbook available for Spain’s national government to execute in the event of a major blackout. 

What it has established recently is its SMS alert system, whereby everyone on the country’s phone network receives a message warning them of imminent dangers or risks. 

At this point in time, Spanish authorities simply don’t consider the risk of a major blackout to be worrisome enough to require a detailed action plan. 

The impossibility of Spain being completely off the grid is shared by those in charge of it – Red Eléctrica de España (REE) – but a Europe-wide blackout would undeniably still bring problems to most of the 48 million people living in this country.

READ ALSO: What are the chances of a big earthquake happening in Spain?

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