Chinese tourists and investors eye Spanish holidays and property

The typical Chinese tourist spent €2,040 on average in Spain last year

As China’s economic might continues its slow trickle down to the millions of newly-created Chinese middle class, an increasing number of Chinese citizens are flocking to Spain to snap up Spanish property and enjoy holidays by the Med…

Where once it was newly-minted Russians giving Brits, Germans and the Irish a run for their money in the real estate market and beaches of Spain, now it is the turn of the Chinese to discover just what makes Spain so perennially popular to those with cash to spare.

As the euro continues to fall against many of the leading currencies around the world, property in Spain represents a more affordable attraction for Chinese buyers than it has for a long time.

The highly publicised Golden Visa scheme – introduced late 2013 – was designed to turn the heads of wealthy Chinese investors, and recent data suggests that it is doing just that. The attraction for Chinese investors is simple: spend more than €500,000 on property investments in Spain and receive a residency permit in Spain, thus opening up the doors for EU education and healthcare for investors and their families.

The scheme got off to a slow start (with only 174 Golden Visas issued between September 2013 and October last year), but China’s real estate companies are confident that those numbers will swell in 2015, as they did last year in Portugal – which introduced the Visa scheme a year sooner than Spain – where 1,775 residency permits were issued to Chinese nationals.

And it’s not just Spanish property that the Chinese are interested in: according to data from the UN World Tourism Organization, a record 287,866 Chinese citizens visited Spain in 2014 – a 13.9 per cent increase on the previous year, with a further increase anticipated for 2015.

But while Russians tended to pour into the beach resorts so beloved of Brits, Chinese visitors to Spain tend to be more interested in city breaks and historical tours, taking in the food, drink, views, culture and – of course – shopping that comes as standard on these types of trips.

Indeed, such is the spending power of many Chinese tourists (they accounted for 31 per cent of all of Spain’s tourism-related revenue in 2014) that the Spanish government is actively seeking to attract more to its major cities, positioning Madrid, Barcelona, Seville and Valencia as shopping Meccas drenched in history and dripping with culinary excellence. Which is all true, of course.

Ten Spanish cities have also recently joined Chinese Friendly, a marketing network that promotes their image to potential Chinese visitors.

Such proactivity may not be necessary, however. According to recent data from travel website TripAdvisor, most Spain-related travel searches on its portal in 2014 came from China, which – although accounting for almost one-fifth of the world’s population – is still a noteworthy statistic.

A study by UNWTO predicts Chinese tourists to represent the largest single bulk of travellers by 2020, by which point an estimated one million will visit Spain annually – and that figure is only going to keep on rising, say experts.