Brit expats are Spain’s third-largest immigrant bloc

On the march: Brits are Spain’s third-largest immigrant group, and their numbers are increasing.

That Brits love Spain has never been in question, but the extent to which Brits have made Spain a home from home has been laid bare in recent statistics published by the Permanent Observatory on Immigration (OPI) body. Well, kind of…

According to the data, Brits are the third-largest group of immigrants in Spain, based on nationality. Spain currently has 4,925,089 non-natives living in the country, based on data gleaned from residence visa numbers and EU data.

Officially, the data shows that there are 275,817 Brits living permanently in Spain, placing Brits third behind Romanians (officially 953,183 registered) and Moroccans, of which there are 770,735 legally resident.

However, despite the data’s official backing – it was reported by the European Commission – the true number of Brits living in Spain is widely considered to be much higher, with the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office estimating the true figure to be three times that number, closer to 800,000.

For Romanians and Moroccans, the chance to officially register and become legally resident in Spain is a more attractive proposition than for the average Brit, who enjoy full EU rights to residency, healthcare and work and, as a result, often arrive in Spain and fail to follow the necessary registration procedures.

Just over half of the nearly five million foreigners living in Spain hail from the EU – a total of 2,773,707 – although that figure has fallen in the past year by 82,530. Overall, Spain ‘lost’ 183,530 foreign residents in 2014, the majority of non-EU nationals acquiring Spanish citizenship and no longer counting as foreign, said the OPI report.

Interestingly, while most nationalities saw their numbers living in Spain decrease in 2014, OPI data shows that the number of Brits resident in Spain actually increased last year by 3.87 per cent – more than any other nationality bar Italians, who grew by six per cent.

Nearly two-thirds of Spain’s foreign residents live in just four of the country’s 17 autonomous communities, led by Catalonia (which officially has 1.085 million foreigners), then Madrid (with 798,187), followed by Andalucía in third place (676,613) and the Valencia region in fourth (660,194).