Residents, Tourists and Beancounters (Part II)

We were looking at the number of foreign residents and their overall value to Spain.

Since last week, fresh totals have appeared, sometimes higher than the ones we produced. As always, they are painstakingly exact, and no doubt, utterly wrong.

A site from the Ministry of Labour and Social Inclusion gives the number of foreigners in Spain as at January 1st, of 6,007,553. So we know how we stand. Although the number is easier to appreciate if it is rounded out to six million foreigners.

Some of them retired, some of them living from income from abroad, some of them working and some of them studying. Some of them sending their money home to their families, as they should.

Spain has a population of 47,440,000 they say, so foreigners make up 12.6% of the whole – that’s one in every eight people.

The Brits are counted in the above guaranteed government figures at 407,628 (as opposed to last week’s padrón figures found elsewhere at 282,124). The Schengen Visa Info – quoting something called Statista, gives us a completely different Brit total in Spain of 313,975.

The ABC meanwhile claims 290,372 Brits resident in Spain (the comments from this right-wing paper about Spain’s foreign population are, as always, a pleasure to read).

Then there’s the INE – the official bean-counter site – which doesn’t have a clue. The best we can find from them is July 2021 ‘non-EU Europeans’, which come to… 603,162 (you see: the Brits, post Brexit, aren’t worth a place of their own any more).

There are other official government sites available, but the browser found a ‘potential security threat and did not continue to www.mites.gob.es’. So, we shall remain blissfully ignorant of the information to be found on that no doubt highly useful page.

Then we have The Mirror headline from October last year which reads: ‘British expats are said to be leaving Spain "in droves"’; while, conversely: Idealista says the opposite: ‘The Brits bought 7,560 homes in the second half of 2021 – the largest group of foreign buyers’. In all, nearly 64,000 homes were bought by foreigners between July and December last year. And that’s good money brought here almost exclusively from outside Spain.  

With all the confusion, the authorities will understandably react according to the figures to hand (once they’ve looked up the phrase ‘in droves’ in the dictionary), without worrying if they are correct; or maybe just go out for a coffee instead.

My estimate last week of the half a million wealthiest foreign residents, worth to Spain some 10,000 million euros each year (plus their 250,000€ homes and 20,000€ cars and so on), brings us back to the question: why chase after just the tourists while ignoring the foreigners who live here, or who potentially could?

The only time the subject of the foreigners come up – beyond of course at Vox rallies – is when it’s time to tax us.

But you won’t find any official agency or policy that promotes foreign home-buyers investing in Spain!

The tourists are counted in a similar exact but hopelessly wrong way as the foreigners. Someone is paid to provide the numbers (a bit like the new school they’re building near us at €724,027.27 – now fellers, hold on just a minute, does that include the chalk?). Perhaps, by not rounding them off, they show how hard they work at these sums.

Tourists, then, are described as anyone foreign who comes to Spain (even if they are taking an onwards flight to somewhere else and never even leave the airport), plus all the people on all the cruise ships – regardless of if they disembark for a two-hour stroll around Málaga harbour or not – plus all the people who hop over to Spain every weekend (add ’em all together José), but not the ones who drove across the frontier or who slept in the guest room last night or on the sofa.

Then we have those non-EU citizens who own homes here are but aren’t allowed to stay for more than 90 in any 180 days. What are they exactly – residents, home-owners, tourists? No one knows or seems to care – except of course for the affronted local businesses.  

A few years ago, I went with a couple of senior local Brit spokesmen (if you see what I mean) to see the delegación provincial – the government representative for Almería and his team – to make the point that, with so many small and disappearing villages, a possible answer might be to turn one or more into an old-folks’ retirement centre for rich wealthy well-heeled foreigners. Do you see the idea? Bring along a few English-speaking nurses – after all, there are plenty of disillusioned Spanish professionals returning from London thanks to the Brexit fallout – to bring movement and life back to some moribund pueblo that has no earthly source of income. You could even sell the homes as lifetimes leases.

Anyway, they said they’d get back to us.