ARCHIVED - Madrid and Barcelona lost 60,000 residents to internal migration in the pandemic year of 2020
The record figure may be related to fear of Covid or to claustrophobic lockdown experiences!
Whether it was the due to fear of Covid contagion or to the frustration of being couped up in inner city apartments during lockdown, data published this week by the Spanish government’s central statistics unit show that as many as 59,750 people moved out of the provinces of Madrid and Barcelona in 2020 to take up residence in neighbouring, less densely populated provinces.
This marked exodus from Spain’s two major cities is the most pronounced since comparable data were first compiled in 1998, although it also represents the acceleration of a trend which began in 2015. Last year Madrid “lost” 38,240 residents to neighbouring provinces, while another 21,510 moved out of Barcelona to live further from the capital of Catalunya.
(The figures are the balance obtained when offsetting those registering as new residents in each province against those leaving the province, taking into account only those migrating within Spain.)
As a result of this demographic migration, when the number of new arrivals per province is converted into percentages of the local population, six out of the top ten are provinces share boundaries with either Madrid or Barcelona. Among those around Madrid are Toledo, which gained 8,094 residents from other provinces, Guadalajara (4,142), Ávila (1,970), Segovia (1,300) and Cuenca (1,099), while it would appear that those leaving Barcelona headed mainly for the other Catalan provinces of Tarragona (6,154), Girona (4,719) and Lleida (1,666).
However, apart from Madrid and Barcelona only 10 other provinces reported a negative balance in terms of people leaving or arriving from elsewhere in Spain, and the third and fourth most heavily populated, Valencia and Sevilla, gained more than they lost.