Rags to riches: Wealthiest and most hard-up towns revealed

SPAIN'S wealthiest and poorest towns have been revealed, with similar results to the last study, in August 2016,, which put the Madrid 'celebrity belt' satellite town of Pozuelo de Alarcón as the richest in the country.

Home to footballers, actors, politicians and property tycoons, many of whom live in gated urbanisations – particularly the luxury complex known as La Finca (pictured), the most élite housing estate in the country – each resident in Pozuelo de Alarcón earns a gross average of €72,993 per year.

This is up from €70,298 in 2016, showing the town's inhabitants are not suffering the effects of wage cuts – and, in fact, according to tax office data, not a single person in Pozuelo is registered as unemployed.

Contrast this with the village of Zahínos (second picture) in the far-western land-locked region of Extremadura – sitting in the province of Badajoz just a few kilometres from the Portuguese border, its 2,819 inhabitants live off the coal industy and their gross average income per head is just €11,166 – below the tax threshold, meaning a monthly income of just €863.60 compared with Pozuelo's €4,136.20.

 

Top 10 wealthiest towns closest to Madrid and Barcelona...except Rocafort (Valencia)

Once again, the wealthiest towns in Spain are those within roughly a 40-kilometre radius of Barcelona and Madrid: Pozuelo is just 27 kilometres north-west of the city, whilst the second-richest town, Matadepera, is 31 kilometres outside of Barcelona with a gross annual per capita income of €54,113, taking over from Majadahonda, 32 kilometres to the north of Madrid, whose annual per-head income has gone down from €56,000 in 2016 to around €51,000 in 2018.

Boadilla del Monte, close to Pozuelo and 36 kilometres from Madrid, is the third-richest town in Spain with an average gross annual income of €53,400 per person, or a net monthly earning of around €3,161.

Fourth-wealthiest is Sant Just Desvern, a mere eight kilometres from Barcelona city and with an income of €52,263 per head per year, whilst Majadahonda is fifth and Sant Cugat del Vallés, 11 kilometres from Barcelona, is seventh with the average person earning €50,840 per year.

Eighth is Sant Vicenç de Montalt, 35 kilometres from Barcelona city and with the average resident earning €50,691 per year, or typically €3,019 a month, just a few euros more than ninth-placed Alcobendas' €50,550 a year and tenth-placed Las Rozas' €50,286 per annum – two towns located 13.5 and 32 kilometres from Madrid respectively.

Number six is the only exception – the sole town in the top 10 wealthiest in Spain outside of a 40-kilometre radius of Madrid or Barcelona is the Valencian town of Rocafort, which has started making real money from the services industries, abandoning its traditional trades of farming, stone and marble mining, and whose residents now declare average per-head earnings of €51,056 a year.

 

For richer, for poorer: Residents in same region earn between €73,000 and €16,700 on average

Living in a town in the same region as one of Spain's largest two cities does not automatically translate to wealth: Cenicientos, in the Greater Madrid region, averages an annual gross income per resident of €16,736, or about €1,172.50 per month, assuming these earnings come from employment rather than self-employment, in which case they would drop to €906.59 a month.

Catalunya residents are less likely to be well-off if they live a long distance from the Barcelona metropolitan area: in the southernmost province of Tarragona, inhabitants of Batea earn just €15,339 per year, translating to a monthly income of €1,091 if employed, or €807.63 if self-employed.

Madrid is the only region with an mean average gross income per head of over €30,000 – totalling €34,272 – with the rest somewhere in the 20s, with the exception of Extremadura whose mean average earnings per head are the only ones in the country below €20,000, at €19,389; in its richest municipality, the provincial capital city of Badajoz, the average per-head gross annual income is €25,553, being a monthly salary of €1,686.70 if employed or €1,531.12 if self-employed.

All other regions have a top income in the high 20s or 30s.

 

After the biggest two cities: Balearics, Asturias, Cantabria and Aragón

After Madrid and Catalunya, the richest region is the Balearic Islands – probably fruit of its thriving mainstream tourist industry and its high-end celebrity holidaymaker culture, given that some of Spain's most expensive homes are in these islands, principally in Ibiza. Here, the wealthiest town is the picturesque enclave of Valldemossa, Mallorca (third picture), with a gross annual income of €39,689, and even in the poorest town in the region, earnings are higher than Extremadura's average at €20,408 per year, the typical figure in Capdepera, Mallorca.

In terms of mean average wages, Asturias is the fourth-wealthiest with a figure of €25,502 per person per year, although its richest municipality, Oviedo, has an average individual wage of €28,851, beaten by several others in different regions which break the €30,000 barrier. Those who live in Asturias' poorest town, Villayón, earn just €14,888 per year.

Cantabria is the fifth-richest region in terms of average earnings, which currently sit at €24,989 per person per year, with Santa Cruz de Bezana being its wealthiest town with wages of €30,432 per capita, two-and-a-half times those of the poorest town of Soba, where average gross earnings are just €12,815 a year.

Aragón, despite its vast swathes of uninhabited rural landscape dotted with villages whose typical headcount is under 30 – a region fighting depopulation and clamouring for basic services such as internet and mobile phone connections – is the sixth-wealthiest of Spain's 17 regions. Some of this may be linked to its thriving skiing industry, with four major resorts in Aragón – Cerler and Formigal-Panticosa in the Huesca Pyrénées and Javalambre and Valdelinares in Teruel – or to city tourism, given that the capital, Zaragoza, is the fifth-largest in Spain. But the richest town in the region is Andorra – not to be confused with the tiny Pyrénéen country of the same name – where each resident earns an average of €28,562, compared with the region's average of €24,742, and which is not in ski country, whilst Fabara is in the province of Zaragoza and is the poorest town in Aragón, with gross earnings of a typical €14,981 per annum.

The Comunidad Valenciana on the east coast squeezes in seventh, largely thanks to Rocafort's €51,000 a year, forcing the average annual pay up to €23,436.

Whilst Torrevieja, in the far south of the region, was named Spain's poorest town in 2016 with average earnings a few euros under €14,000, this research was based upon municipalities of roughly 50,000 to 100,000 or more inhabitants; current figures show the poorest location in the Comunidad Valenciana is the hinterland village of Venta del Moro in the far west, where residents earn just €13,396 per year, or just €1 per year less than in Torrevieja.

The two middle-of-the-road regions in terms of income in Spain are the Canary Islands, with salaries of a typical €23,243 per annum, rising to €35,904 in Santa Brígida and falling to €13,603 in Garafía, and Castilla y León at €23,119, rising to €38,394 in Simancas (Valladolid province) and falling to €14,055 in Casavieja (Ávila province).

 

Bottom half: Galicia, Murcia and Andalucía among less wealthy, despite massive tourism industry

Despite being home to one of the wealthiest towns in the country – Oleiros (A Coruña province) being Spain's 11^th richest with gross earnings of €40,385 per annum – Galicia is in the lower half of the earning scale by regions at €22,762 per annum, and in its poorest town, Cervantes (Lugo province), residents earn €12,054 a year.

Murcia, despite being an excellent tourism destination thanks to the thermal waters of the Mar Menor, its proliferation of spas and luxury golf courses and swathes of urbanisations, comes 11^th out of 17 regions with average earnings of €22,286 per annum, up to €27,000 in Molina de Segura and down to €15,022 in Albudeite (fourth picture).

And although residents in Tomares (Sevilla province) earn a lucrative €33,637 per annum, Andalucía – a thriving tourism hotspot with excellent beaches and home to the celebrity getaway town of Marbella – comes 12^th out of 17 with an average annual income of €21,799, and its poorest town is Puerto Serrano (Cádiz province), where residents earn €13,342 per year.

Data were not available for the Basque Country, Navarra and La Rioja, which may have slotted in with the above list displacing wealthier regions and pushing them further down, but based upon the remaining 14, Castilla-La Mancha is second from bottom, with gross annual earnings of €21,449 – nearly €10,000 lower than the central region's wealthiest town of Cabanillas del Campo (Guadalajara province) at €31,283, and almost €10,000 higher than its poorest town, Nerpio (Albacete province), where residents earn €12,582 per year.