Birth rate fell in the Canary Islands by 4% in 2022, the year in which it consolidated as the community with the fewest children per woman: 0.86 compared to the national average, which is 1.16.
However, with 494 births last year, the birth rate increased in Arrecife by 1.4% compared to the previous year, according to data published this Wednesday by the National Institute of Statistics (INE), which also offers data from the large municipalities.
The growth in Arrecife would not seem very remarkable if it were not because almost all municipalities with more than 50,000 inhabitants in the Canary Islands experienced declines. This occurred in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Santa Lucía de Tirajana, Arona, San Cristóbal de La Laguna and Santa Cruz de Tenerife.
In addition to the capital of Lanzarote, only San Bartolomé de Tirajana increased its births in 2022 compared to the previous year, but the increase was only 0.7%. Curiously, in Telde, exactly the same number of births was repeated in 2022 as in 2021.
In total, 12,219 boys and girls were born in the Canary Islands last year, when in 2010 there were 18,305, and in 2015 they amounted to 16,146.
The Canary Islands has the eighth largest drop in births among all the autonomous communities and the two autonomous cities. In Spain as a whole, they fell by 2.4%.
Last year there were 329,251 births in Spain, which was 8,129 less, 2.4%, than in 2021, which confirms a downward trend, only interrupted in 2014, which accumulates a decrease of 27.6% in the ten years since 2012.
In fact, in 2012 an average of 1,242 babies were born per day in Spain, and in 2022 there were only 902, 340 less.
83.5% of births, 2.3 points less, were concentrated in women aged 25 to 40, with an average that remained at 32.6 years -33.1 years among Spanish mothers and 30.5 among foreign mothers-, although births by women over 40 years of age grew to 11% of the total, 4.8 points more than in 2012.
Almost one in four births, 23%, were to foreign mothers, which was 1.61 points more than in 2021.
