Spain population growth shifts into reverse

In the first half of the year, 19,000 more people died than were born in Spain – the first such imbalance since the Civil War of the ’30s.

If you’ve ever wanted to do something good for your European neighbours, now’s the time to take the plunge and make that move to Spain you’ve been planning.

Why? Well aside from the country offering one of the healthiest and happiest lifestyles in the world, and the fact that it has an abundance of affordable, high-quality property for sale, and the fact that its climate is wonderfully warm and sunny all year round, you would also be helping to arrest Spain’s shrinking population…

Data from the National Statistics Institute (INE) published last week has revealed that Spain registered more deaths than births in the first six months of this year for the first time in many decades.

The number of people who died exceeded the number born by 19,000, and not since the bloody civil war of 1936-39, and before that the deadly Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, has the country ever experienced this phenomenon, save for a one-off blip in 1999.

Other European nations such as Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands and Denmark have had to contend with a shrinking and ageing population for many years now, but Spain’s Catholicism and its love of large families usually meant it was creating more Spaniards than it was losing each year.

But today, as the world becomes a smaller, more navigable place, and the cost of raising a family continues to increase at a pace faster than wages, many younger Spaniards are putting off having children in order to save money, explore the world or live in another country.

Indeed, the semi-mass exodus of Spain’s youth between 2012 and 2014 – triggered by mass unemployment at home – has not yet been fully reversed, and the INE is expecting the trend of more deaths and fewer births to actually widen every year until about 2062.

Currently Spain’s population stands at just above 46 million, but is set to shrink by around one million in the next 15 years, and could drop below 40 million by 2060, the INE calculates.

Spain is also getting older, too. The average age of the population is 43.2 years, which is the tenth oldest in the world, with the UN expecting that to rise to 50.1 years by 2030, which would make Spain the world’s fourth-oldest.

Spaniards live for a long time, that much is true. And they also love children – that much is certainly true. But the country is simply following a trend set by much of the rest of Europe, which is ageing more quickly than any other region on the planet. So if you fancy doing your bit to help out, then why not make the move to Spain while you’re still, well, relatively young?