THE average resident in Spain spends just over €800 a year on eating out in restaurants – equivalent to €67 a month or slightly less than €15.50 a week, according to the National Statistics Institute (INE).
Northerners and those in land-locked central regions shell out the most on dining out – Extremadura, to the west of Spain, leads the field at an average of €982 a year per head, €18.88 a week or €81.83 a month.
Centre-north region Castilla y León comes second with residents spending €949 a year on eating out, followed by north-eastern Navarra at €943, north-western Galicia at €937 and Cantabria on the north coast at €935.
It is Spain's colder regions which see the most spent on restaurants – other than in the Canary Islands, where residents stump up €933 a year on eating out – with Cantabria's and Galicia's neighbour, Asturias, spending €916 per head per year and the Pyrénéen wine region of La Rioja, €901, being €17.33 a week or €75.08 a month.
Some of Spain's more touristy regions come farther down the list – Murcia is near the bottom with a typical inhabitant spending €628 a year on dining out, being €12.08 a week or €52.33 a month, only beating the Spanish-owned city-provinces of Ceuta and Melilla where, jointly, residents shell out €608 a year on restaurants.
And although the average Balearic Island resident spends a healthy €844 per annum on eating out, this is still below Castilla-La Mancha's €846.
Catalunya's inhabitants plough more money into restaurant visits than those in the Valencia region's three provinces of Alicante, Castellón and Valencia on the east coast - €837 compared to €795.
This puts Valencia below the average of €805 a year, but the Mediterranean region is still ahead of Spain's capital – people from Madrid only spend €693 a year on restaurants, despite many commuters having to dine out at lunchtime as it would take them too long to get home at midday – as well as beating the Basque Country, one of Spain's wealthiest regions, and Aragón which bucks the trend set by the rest of the north, where residents in both spend €765 a year on eating out.
In total, as opposed to per head, Andalucía leads the way with €6.74 billion spent in the region's restaurants every year, although this is partly because it is one of the biggest of Spain's 17 autonomously-governed communities.
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