Over the past 150 years Spain's population has more than doubled, despite heavy emigration, first to Latin America, especially Argentina, Cuba and Venezuela, then, in the 1950s and 1960s, to France, Germany and Switzerland. Today Spain has about 49 million inhabitants, and in recent years it has grown almost entirely through immigration.
Cities and countryside
Twentieth-century industrialisation emptied the countryside and made the cities swell, deeply changing society. Today the population is concentrated in the Madrid area, along the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts and on the islands, while vast inland areas in Castile and León, Aragon, Castilla-La Mancha and Extremadura have been depopulated: this is the so-called España vaciada, "emptied Spain", where some provinces, such as Soria and Teruel, have fewer than 10 people per km², figures similar to Lapland. Depopulation has become a political issue, to the point that local parties have been founded to defend these areas.
The peoples of Spain
The 1978 Constitution recognises the "nationalities and regions" that make up Spain, with wide linguistic and cultural autonomy (see administrative divisions). Besides the Castilians, identified with Spaniards in the narrow sense, there are:
- the Catalans, with a Romance language close to the Occitan of southern France, also spoken in the Valencian Community, the Balearics and, in Italy, in Alghero, Sardinia;
- the Basques, whose language, Euskera, is unrelated to any other known language and is probably the last survivor of the languages spoken in western Europe before the arrival of the Indo-Europeans;
- the Galicians, with a sister language of Portuguese and a strong tradition tied to Atlantic culture, often called "Celtic".
There are also strong regional identities in Andalusia, the Canaries, Aragon, Asturias and elsewhere (see the Spanish language). There is also a large Gitano (Roma) community, which arrived on the peninsula in the fifteenth century and is estimated at between 700,000 and a million people, concentrated mainly in Andalusia, Madrid and Catalonia, to whom much of flamenco culture is owed.
From emigrants to immigrants
Since the late 1990s Spain has become one of Europe's main destinations for immigration: millions of people have arrived from Latin America, helped by the shared language, from Morocco, Romania and other countries. The 2008 crisis temporarily reversed the trend, pushing many young Spaniards to emigrate too, but since 2015 the flows have resumed strongly. Today over nine million residents were born abroad, almost one in five; the largest communities are Moroccans, Colombians, Venezuelans, Romanians and Argentinians. The Italian community in Spain is also one of the largest in western Europe.
A long-lived population
Spaniards are among the longest-lived people in the world, with a life expectancy of about 84 years, but the birth rate is very low, around 1.1 children per woman, and the median age exceeds 44. Pensions, healthcare and housing are the big issues linked to these changes (see Spain today and facts and figures).