A few weeks behind the demographers’ forecast, Catalonia has reached eight million inhabitants, according to data published this Friday by the Institute of Statistics of Catalonia (Idescat). The Catalan population has, therefore, gone from six to eight million inhabitants between 1987 and 2023 due, above all, to the push of immigration.
Catalan society is now very different from the one that featured in the famous slogan of Jordi Pujol’s time. ‘It’s 6 million‘, fundamentally because currently there is less birth rate, more foreigners and the population is older.
For example, since 2018 there have been more deaths than birthsso, with a rate that does not reach 1.5 children per woman, “if foreigners did not arrive, the population would stop,” as he explained Albert Estevedirector of the Center for Demographic Studies of the UAB in EL PERIÓDICO at the beginning of the month, when it was already glimpsed on the horizon that Catalonia would exceed eight million inhabitants.
The territorial distribution
The decline in the birth rate is offset by the arrival of immigrants, given that Catalonia and, especially, Barcelona, is a focus of attraction of the first order. “Although there are areas that are losing population while others only receive one type of immigrants and others welcome other profiles… “The situation is heterogeneous,” warns Esteve.
The population increase is concentrated in the Metropolitan area of Barcelona, where 121 of its 125 municipalities have gained population. Likewise, there are increases in central Catalonia and large pre-coastal and coastal areas, both in the regions of Girona and Camp de Tarragona. On the other hand, it is in the Ponent lands and in the Terres de l’Ebre where a population decline is observed.
In this way, as detailed by Idescat, 73% of the population is concentrated in the province of Barcelona, while in Tarragona 11% live there, in Girona 10% and in Lleida only 6%.
The immigrants
If, during the Franco regime, Catalonia grew by almost two and a half million inhabitants thanks to citizens from other parts of Spain, since the 2000s, attracted by the construction boom, most of the arrivals are from foreign. Thus, since the beginning of the century, more than one million immigrants have settled in Catalonia, which places the community, with a growth of 3.4 per thousand, above the Spanish and European average.
In this way, the population of immigrant origin has gone from a marginal 1.6% (just over 100,000 people) at the end of the 80s to representing 21% of citizens. They are a total of 1.65 million people, the majority coming from the European continent (31%), America (28%, divided between 19.5% from South America and the rest from Central America and the USA) and Africa (25.5%). . The remaining 14.6% are from Asia and Oceania.
And according to Julio Pérez Díaz, sociologist and scientist at the CSIC, arrivals “are going to continue to occur,” so “an appropriate policy consists of preparing, making an effort to integration and avoid racist ideologies.” One of Catalonia’s future challenges is, therefore, integration and social cohesion, so that current and future immigrants have work, housing and access to education, healthcare and other citizen rights.
The aging
Another of the big differences with Pujol’s period at the end of the eighties is the aging population. Almost 40 years ago the average age of Catalans was 36.3 years and today it is 43.3 years.
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The population over 65 years of age has doubled since 1987 and now represents 19.3% of the total, with 1,528,322 people in this age group. Furthermore, life expectancy has gone from 77.2 years to 83.6 years, a progression that is increasing.
And how are the women Those who live the longest, 50.8% of the population, 4,065,088 people, are women, compared to 3,940,696 men.