3 November 2016

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MADRID - Spain is facing a tourist record year with more foreign tourists than ever before. Between the beginning of January and the end of September, 60.3 million foreign tourists came to Spain for a holiday in nine months. That is 10.1% more than last year, which turned out to be a record year. The number of Dutch and Belgian tourists has also risen again this year. If it continues this way, Spain will get a new record year in terms of foreign tourists. Last year it closed with 68.1 million tourists but it is thought that this number will be surpassed this year and will end somewhere around 70 million international holidaymakers. A large proportion of these tourists are also called "borrowed" tourists in Spain because of the many problems in other tourist countries such as Turkey, Tunisia, France and Greece, so these holidaymakers seek their escape from the "safe" Spain.

The figures from the Spanish Bureau of Statistics (INE) indicate that 10.1% more foreign tourists came to Spain during the first nine months of this year with a total of 60,345,624 holidaymakers. In September alone 7.8 million tourists came to Spain, a 10.2% more than last September.

Nationalities

As usual, the largest group of foreign tourists comes from the United Kingdom again, with 14.4 million (+ 13%) coming to Spain from the end of September. Second on the list are the tourists from France with 9.2 million (+ 9.6%) holidaymakers and Germany third with 8.9 million (+ 4.3%) tourists. The number of Scandinavians coming to Spain on holiday rose to 3.8 million (+ 12.1%) tourists and the number of Italian holidaymakers remained at 3.2 million (+ 4.9%) tourists.

Dutch and Belgians

Just like almost all nationalities, there were also risers in the number of Dutch and Belgian tourists. In the month of September, 322,873 (+ 4.8%) Dutch and 214,072 (-6.2%) Belgians came to Spain. The total over the first nine months of 2016 increased for Dutch tourists by 9.7% to 2,781,955 holidaymakers and also the number of Belgian tourists increased by 2% to 1,908,847 tourists.

Regions

The most visited and popular region of Spain is still Catalonia with a number of 14.4 million (+ 4.4%) tourists during the first nine months of 2016. As the second popular region on the list are the Balearic Islands with 11, 5 million (+ 10.6%) tourists followed by the Canary Islands with 9.6 million (+ 13.2%) tourists and Andalusia with 8.4 million (+ 13.2%) international holidaymakers. The regions Comunidad Valenciana, with 6.3 million (+ 16%) tourists and the Comunidad de Madrid with 4.2 million (+ 13.1%) holidaymakers, are the bottom lanes.

Transport

Most of the international travelers came to Spain by plane, with 48.1 million (+ 11.2%) passengers arriving at one of the airports in Spain during the first nine months of this year. In addition, 10.6 million (+ 5.7%) tourists traveled by road (car, motorcycle, bus, camper) to Spain and 1.2 million (+ 8.7%) tourists received the ports. The number of train passengers also rose to 293,865 (+ 4.7%)

Source: Spain today

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