(Madrid) The number of foreign tourists has risen sharply this summer in Spain, thanks to the lifting of anti-COVID-19 restrictions, while remaining well below the pre-pandemic record level that Madrid had hoped to regain, according to official data. published on Tuesday.
Posted at 9:35 a.m.
The country, the second largest tourist destination in the world after France before the COVID-19 crisis, welcomed 9.1 million tourists in July and 8.8 million in August, detailed the National Institute of Statistics (INE).
These figures are up 106.2% and 69.7% compared to the levels of July and August 2021, themselves significantly higher than those of the summer of 2020, weighed down by the pandemic.
The number of foreign visitors nevertheless remained below the record figures of 2019, which Madrid hoped to regain thanks to the recovery: a total of 17.9 million travelers came to Spain this summer, compared to 20 million three years ago.
In a press release, the Spanish Minister of Tourism, Reyes Maroto, nevertheless hailed an “extraordinary high tourist season”. “We face the fall without inflation and uncertainty caused by the war” in Ukraine “weighing on the recovery for the moment”, she added.
In the first eight months of the year, Spain welcomed a total of 48 million tourists, or 83% of the pre-pandemic level, according to the INE. Tourism spending reached 63.9 billion euros, or 92% of the 2019 figure.
The tourist recovery recorded since the beginning of the year has been made possible by the return of British tourists (10.2 million in total), whose number has increased sevenfold compared to 2021, but also French tourists (7 million, +160%) and Germans (6.6 million, +157%).
The regions that have benefited the most from this recovery are Catalonia, with 9.9 million tourists (+245%), the Balearic Islands (9.7 million, +149%), the Canary Islands (7.8 million, + 350%) and Andalusia (6.7 million, +248%).
Spain, which received 83.5 million foreign visitors in 2019, has suffered greatly from mobility restrictions intended to curb the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2020, the country only welcomed 19 million visitors. And last year, only 31.1 million travelers visited the country, while the government expected 45 million.