SPAIN'S richest, poorest, oldest, youngest, most densely-populated and most actively-employed towns and cities have been revealed – the National Statistics Institute (INE) has provided a snapshot of life in over 400 municipalities of 20,000 or more inhabitants, in figures.
Pozuelo de Alarcón (Greater Madrid region), the ‘celebrity town’ with the highest income and life expectancy and lowest unemployment (photo: Pozuelo de Alarcón town hall)
Torrevieja, in the south of the province of Alicante, has the most foreign-born residents, at 43.8% of its headcount, whilst in the same province but towards the north, Benidorm has the most one-family households, at 39.1%.
Usually topping the list of Spain's wealthiest towns, Pozuelo de Alarcón, in the Greater Madrid region – home to celebrities, footballers and politicians and top-of-the-range, gated urbanisations – shows the highest annual after-tax income per head, the most frequent averaging at €28,326, or €2,360.50 a month.
It also has the lowest unemployment in the country, at 6.45% and, as proof that financial comfort and job security is conducive to long-term health, the highest life expectancy in Spain at 86 years and 10-and-a-half weeks – which suggests women's life expectancy in Pozuelo is probably nearly 90, given that the difference between sexes is typically about four years; the approximate range would be about 84 for men and 88 for women, based upon the figure for residents across the board.
At the opposite end of the scale, the town of Linares in the land-locked Andalucía province of Jaén has the highest unemployment, at 32.4%, and the coastal town of Níjar in the province of Almería, also in Andalucía, has the lowest net annual income per head at €7,307, or just €609 a month.
Despite Pozuelo de Alarcón's having the longest life expectancy and the east and south coast and islands being some of the most popular choices for northern Europeans seeking to retire in the sun, the town with the largest proportion of its residents being of pension age – over 65 – is Ferrol, on the coast of the province of A Coruña in Spain's far north-western region of Galicia.
The birth rate in Spain has long been in free-fall and the country has one of Europe's highest average ages for first-time mums – around 33, although in practice, seven in 10 women aged over 35 do not have children even if they would like to, and one in five first-time mothers is over 40 – but the city of Melilla, directly due south of the province of Almería on the northern African coast, is where the most children are born: 2.17 on average per woman.
This means it is fairly logical that Melilla is where the largest slice of the population is aged 14 or under, at 23.1% of the total.
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com