Population rises to 47 million, Brits are the oldest and third-largest foreigner group

The annual data from the National Institute of Statistics, based upon the census as at January 1 this year, have just been published and reveal that 8.9 million people in Spain are aged over 65, that the youngest foreigners are from Hondurás and the oldest are from the UK.

Distribution by sexes - 49% men and 51% women - has not changed, but the country as a whole is getting older: only 15.7% are aged under 16, whilst over a third, or 36.3% are between 16 and 44, another 28.7% are aged from 45 to 64 and the over-65s make up 19.3%.

Whilst foreigners account for just over 10.7%, or around five million, a growing number were born in Spain; the total figure for those born abroad, whether they are Spanish or foreign, is 14.3%.

The average age of a person living in Spain is 43, and a third of Spanish nationals - 34.1% - are in the 16-44 age bracket, whilst 55% of non-Spaniards fall within this range.

Spaniards are slightly older than the national mean figure, with an average age of 44, whilst the average age of a foreign resident across the board is 36 years and, for an EU expat, 40 years.

Citizens of Hondurás are the youngest migrant group, with an average age of 30.3 years, followed by those from Pakistan (30.9) and from Morocco (31).

British nationals living in Spain are the oldest, with an average age of 53.6, followed by the Germans at 49.2 and the French at 42.6.

Moroccans continue to be the largest national group of non-Spaniards, totalling 812,412, followed by Romanians, who make up 669,434, and Brits third at 249,015.

Italians (227,912), Chinese (224,372) and Colombians (206,413) complete the top six.

The national group which has grown the most in the past year are the Venezuelans, who still only account for 41,956 inhabitants but whose headcount has risen by 43.9% due to soaring numbers of expats and asylum-seekers heading to the mother country to escape the deepening political crisis at home.

In terms of proportion rather than number, the Balearic Islands are the 'most foreign' region, with 17.8% of inhabitants being non-Spanish; Catalunya has the second-highest foreigner ratio, at 15.1%, and Murcia, 14.1%.

Regions with the smallest proportion of non-Spanish residents are Extremadura, with just 3%; Galicia, with 3.7%, and Asturias, with 4.1%.

Four regions account for 59% of the country's total population: Andalucía, home to 8.4 million residents; Catalunya, with 7.6 million inhabitants; the Greater Madrid region, with 6.6 million, and the Comunidad Valenciana, with five million.

Although it does not always follow, those regions with the smallest headcount are among those which are the smallest in land mass: La Rioja, with 317,000; Cantabria, with 581,000, and Navarra, with 654,000.

The population has grown in all bar four of Spain's autonomously-governed regions: in Extremadura, Asturias, Castilla y León, and Galicia, resident numbers have gone down.

Foreigner numbers either grew or remained the same in all 17 regions, but reduced in the Spanish-owned city-provinces of Ceuta and Melilla on the northern Moroccan coast, although in terms of the country as a whole, Melilla has the second-largest foreigner ratio, at 15.3%.

For continents or country groups, citizens of the 28 European Union member States make up 36.3% of non-Spaniards, and those from African nations, 22.3%.

The number of Spanish nationals contracted slightly in the last year, by 0.01% or 6,186, whilst foreign residents swelled in number by 290,573, or 6.1%, of whom 36,049, or 2% of the non-native population overall, were from the European Union and 254,524 were from third countries, accounting for 8.6% of the total foreigner population.

Non-Spaniards have not broken the five million barrier since 2014, but the number of new expats in 2018 was nearly double the figure for 2017.

Spanish nationals total 42 million, or 89.3% of the total population of 47,007,367.

The country's headcount has risen by 0.6% in the past year, by a total of 284,387.

Of these, four in 10 live in towns or cities of more than 100,000 inhabitants, and over 5,000 villages in Spain are home to fewer than 1,000 inhabitants.