MADRID and Barcelona jointly 'lost' 60,000 inhabitants in 2020, whilst the provinces of Valencia and Sevilla saw a significant rise as city-dwellers rethought their life plans during the long months of restrictions on movement and the increase in working from home.
According to the National Statistics Institute's (INE's) Residential Variations Statistics for the whole of last year, based on padrón or local headcount census figures, the number of inhabitants who moved out of the top two largest cities in Spain, or their wider provinces, is the highest ever seen since annual figures started being collated in 1998.
This contrasts sharply with the year 2015 when a record number of residents in Spain moved into the two biggest metropolitan areas – 31,000 that year – which may have been related to a need to live in a major urban hub in order to find work, or meaningful work.
Within five years and with the country thrust almost overnight into total lockdown and everyone whose job permitted it ordered to work from home, suddenly location ceased to be an issue for many, particularly office workers, who no longer needed to be within comfortable commuting distance of their company.
Residents moving out has been seen far more in Madrid than in Barcelona – the single-province region which is home to Spain's capital and a number of large commuter towns around it lost a total of 38,240 over 2020, compared with the 21,510 who left the province of Barcelona.
And yet the province home to the country's third-largest city – and, in fact, the nation's third-most populated province – Valencia gained 3,790 residents, whilst Sevilla, the fourth-largest metropolitan area in Spain, and its wider province increased their headcount by 432 in total through people previously living elsewhere in the country moving in.
In the case of Valencia, the province is large enough that residents in it can live up to 90 kilometres outside the city in any direction, and in descending order from the biggest to the smallest municipality in the country, Valencia is the first on the list with fewer than a million inhabitants.
Also, its most densely-populated parts are within approximately 25 kilometres of the coast; huge swathes to its west are rural and very sparsely-inhabited.
To this end, it would not be difficult to infer that 'leavers' last year were in search of smaller communities, countryside or coast as a substitute for busy city streets.
And the INE's follow-up of this migration seems to confirm this: Those who dropped off the padrón in the two main cities largely re-registered in neighbouring provinces.
Around 43.4% of those who moved out of Madrid were 'absorbed' by provinces bordering it – especially Toledo, just to the south (8,094) and Guadalajara, to its north-east (4,142), as well as the Castilla y León provinces of Ávila (1,970) and Segovia (1,300), and the Castilla-La Mancha province of Cuenca, directly to the east of Madrid (1,099).
Nearly six in 10 – 58.3% - of those who left Barcelona ended up in another Catalunya province: Tarragona, the southernmost of the region's four, became the new home for 6,154 people; Girona, directly to the north and backing onto the French border, absorbed 4,719, and Catalunya's only land-locked province, Lleida, accounted for 1,666 of the Barcelona exodus.
In the case of Lleida and the provinces surrounding Madrid, the population tends to be sparse and the territory is largely rural, with even provincial capital cities being little bigger than a typical Madrid satellite municipality; and in the case of Catalunya, the provinces targeted by the majority of the 'leavers' are home to two of Spain's popular holiday coasts, the Costa Brava and Costa Daurada.
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