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🇪🇸 Migration in Spain: where do people move to and from?

Updated June 2026 · ~4 min read

Spain has swung from a country of emigrants to one of Europe's biggest immigration destinations. Here's where Spaniards emigrate to and where Spain's immigrants come from, using official figures from INE and UN DESA.

8.8M
Foreign-born residents in Spain
3.0M
Spaniards living abroad (diaspora)

Where do Spaniards move to?

Top destinations by number of Spaniards living there:

1
🇦🇷Argentina
505,940
2
🇫🇷France
320,749
3
🇺🇸United States
220,715
4
🇬🇧United Kingdom
196,940
5
🇩🇪Germany
193,518
6
🇲🇽Mexico
167,000
7
🇨🇺Cuba
150,000
8
🇧🇷Brazil
133,000
9
🇨🇭Switzerland
131,000
10
🇻🇪Venezuela
124,000

Where do Spain's immigrants come from?

Top countries of origin for immigrants living in Spain:

1
🇲🇦Morocco
1,092,892
2
🇨🇴Colombia
856,616
3
🇻🇪Venezuela
599,769
4
🇷🇴Romania
532,456
5
🇪🇨Ecuador
448,643
6
🇦🇷Argentina
415,987
7
🇵🇪Peru
378,924
8
🇬🇧United Kingdom
285,093
9
🇨🇺Cuba
223,532
10
🇫🇷France
217,247
In January 2025 the number of Spanish nationals registered abroad surpassed 3 million for the first time (3,045,966), up 4.7% in a single year - the biggest increases were in Argentina, Mexico and the USA.Source: INE, PERE, 1 Jan 2025
Spain's diaspora is mostly not Spain-born: about 71.8% of Spanish nationals abroad were born outside Spain - reflecting descendants of earlier emigrants who acquired Spanish nationality.Source: INE, PERE, 1 Jan 2025
Immigration is reshaping Spain: people born abroad reached 18.2% of the population in January 2024 (up from 17.1% a year earlier), driven mainly by arrivals from Colombia, Peru and Venezuela.Source: INE, Censo Anual de Poblacion, 1 Jan 2024
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Sources

INE (Spain) - Padron de Espanoles Residentes en el Extranjero (PERE, 2025; outbound counts Spanish nationals, many born abroad) and Censo Anual de Poblacion (2024, by country of birth). UN DESA International Migrant Stock 2024.

Note: inbound and outbound figures are drawn from different official datasets and measured in different ways (e.g. foreign-born residents vs. citizens registered abroad), so the two directions are not strictly symmetric.