The Costa del Sol, and the entire province of Malaga, has been a magnet for foreigners over past decades, and it looks as if it will continue to be that in the future, to judge by the accelerated increase in the number of foreigners moving to this part of the world over the past five years. But unlike decades gone by, foreign residents are moving to all parts of the province as the 21st century gets underway. Some – mainly the older generation – have come to enjoy the magnificent climate of the region in retirement, while others – mostly Moroccans and South Americans – come in search of a better working life in a place where the sun happens to shine for most of the year.
Both groups are well represented in the latest municipal population figures, corresponding to 2007 and published just a few days ago by the National Institute of Statistics. They show that between 2002 and 2007, the number of immigrants has at least doubled in almost all municipalities in the province of Malaga.
The figures speak for themselves, telling us that more foreigners have moved to the province in the past five years than over any five-year period in the past, the exceptions being towns that already have a high foreign population, such as Torremolinos, Marbella, Mijas and Torrox. In one other isolated case, which is Cuevas del Becerro, the number of new foreigners did not double. Moreover, in almost half of all municipalities in the province, there were five times more foreigners than five years ago. The reason for this sharp rise in foreign population, we are told by the experts, is changes in the regulations allowing more foreigners to move here and live here legally.
Foreigners everywhere
Carmen Carvajal, the professor in the Faculty of Geography at Malaga University who worked on the survey, said that there is now no municipality in the province of Malaga which does not have foreign residents, and this she says, is very significant.
The interior towns and villages of Almáchar, Benalauría, El Borge, Júzcar, Parauta, Villanueva de Tapia and Pujerra, for example, did not have any officially registered foreign residents in 2002, and they now have dozens in each, with the exception of Pujerra, which has gained its sole foreign resident since 2002. At the other extreme is Malaga City, which has 34.481 foreigners. Followed by Marbella, with 29.963, and Mijas, which has 24,705 foreign residents. Professor Carvajal reminds us of the important role played by foreigners in the demographic growth of the provincial capital.
“Malaga City has grown considerably in recent years, and this is mainly due to the arrival of foreigners to the city. Young people living in the city have been moving to the outskirts and to dormitory towns, driven by rising property prices, while foreigners have been moving in,” says professor Carvajal. The figures show that, between 2002 and 2007, Malaga City gained 25,564 new inhabitants, of whom only 2,800 were Spanish. The remaining 22,759 – no less than 89 per cent – were foreigners.
Province
The same kind of figures can be seen in many other municipalities all over the province, where the overall number of foreigners has multiplied by 2.1 in five years, to reach a total of 219,955, which is 14.4 per cent of the entire population. Since 2002, the population of the hundred municipalities in the province of Malaga has increased by 187,513, with foreigners accounting for 60 per cent of this figure.
All this makes Malaga the province with the highest number of foreigners in Andalucía, ahead of Almería and Seville, and the fifth in Spain as a whole, behind Madrid, Barcelona, Alicante and Valencia.
As far as the distribution of this population in the province is concerned, Carvajal tells us that although most are living on the coast, there has been a tendency over recent years for them to move inland. We can see from the recent figures that there are a dozen municipalities in the interior with foreigners making up more than a third of the their population.
More now in the interior
This is the case in towns such as Fuengirola, Torrox, Mijas, Manilva and Benahavís, which is now the only municipality in the province in which foreigners outnumber Spaniards. But this phenomenon can also be seen in small towns and villages in the interior, such as Viñuela, Sedella, Canillas de Aceituno, Casares, Cómpeta, Comares and Alcaucín, where foreigners make up more than a third of the population.
The National Institute of Statistics report tells us that one in four registered foreigners in Malaga is British (56,898), followed by Moroccans (21,251), Argentinians, Germans and Italians. With respect to foreigners who have arrived in the past five years, the statistics show that more than half are European, mainly from the European Union, followed by Moroccans and South Americans. The falling birth rate among the Spanish population and an ageing population makes the arrival of foreigners to this country necessary for our economic future.
