In Spain, there are 294,698 properties for tourist use, according to the latest calculation made by the National Statistics Institute, Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE) and which refers to last February.
This is the second time that the body has published the number of holiday properties in the country as a whole, and the reading we can extract is that the number of properties has fallen by more than 8% compared to August 2020, when there were more than 3 million.
At the height of summer, there were 321,496, representing 1.3% of the residential stock. Together, they accounted for 1.62 million bedplaces and registered an average of 5.1 bedplaces per property. In contrast, at the beginning of the year and in the new wave of covid-19, the weight of tourist dwellings fell to 1.2% of the residential stock, with a total of 1.49 million bedplaces and an average of 5.1 bedplaces per property.
The surprise included in the data presented by the INE is that the province that leads the ranking in terms of number of properties is none other than Alicante. In other words, Alicante tops the list, representing around 11.3% of the total, with more than 32,000 homes. A figure that is practically 50% higher than that of the Catalan capital and double that of the Spanish capital.
Malaga and the Balearic Islands complete the ‘top 3’ together with the Mediterranean province, followed by Barcelona, Las Palmas, Girona, Madrid and Santa Cruz de Tenerife (all of which have more than 17,000). The provinces of Valencia, Cadiz, Tarragona, Murcia, Seville and Granada are the next most prominent in the country, with at least 5,000 homes.
A total of 22 provinces have less than 1,000 tourist dwellings, with Soria, Palencia, Ceuta and Melilla closing the national ranking, with less than 300 tourist dwellings in each case.
To compile this data, the INE explains that it has used “the ‘web scraping’ technique, which by means of software programmes extracts the data from the three most used tourist accommodation platforms in Spain. With regard to the accommodation extracted, first, the tourist dwellings are selected in accordance with the regulations in this area in each autonomous community, and then those dwellings present on more than one platform are eliminated by means of an algorithm that eliminates duplicates”.
