Malaga province has lost over 9,000 foreign residents in one year
Malaga, which is one of the most cosmopolitan provinces in Spain, has seen a drop in its foreign population in recent years.
There are several reasons for this. On one hand, many of the Europeans who chose to retire to the Costa del Sol are now a lot older, but another factor which has made people decide to return to their home countries is that their money doesn’t stretch as far as it did.
Whatever the reason, in the past year the province has lost 9,348 of its foreign residents, according to provisional figures issued by the National Institute of Statistics (INE) earlier this week. Since 2013, 60,000 foreign residents have gone home or moved elsewhere.
The native population, in contrast, is growing. An additional 7, 866 Spanish nationals were added to the population registers of the province in 2015, although this was not so much the result of natural population growth (although the birth rate has risen slightly), but because workers have moved to Malaga from other provinces.
This is a considerable increase, but it did not compensate for the fall in the number of foreign residents. On 1st January 2016 there were 1,627,491 people registered as living in Malaga province, and that figure is 1,482 lower than on the same date in 2015.
5,600 fewer British
There are currently 238,555 foreigners registered in Malaga, which is 14.6 per cent of the population. The British community is the most numerous, although this is also the section of the population which has dropped the most, by a total of 5,598 people in a year, leaving 50,530 residents.
The number of people of other nationalities who have traditionally had a significant presence on the Costa del Sol, such as Germans, Italians and Danish, has also dropped, by 963, 608 and 219 respectively.
However, these are not the only foreign communities whose numbers have reduced. In one year the province has also lost 1,398 Romanians, 502 Bulgarians, 338 Nigerians, 476 Argentinians, 343 Bolivians, 352 Colombians and 261 Ecuadorians.
However, there has been a noticeable increase in the number of Ukrainians who have settled in Malaga. The number has risen by 1,295 in just one year and there are now nearly 10,000 in total. This is undoubtedly linked to the difficult situation in Ukraine, and its conflict with Russia. The number of Russians in Malaga has also increased by 379, and more people have also come to Malaga from Morocco and China.source surinenglish