The experimental statistics of the National Institute of Statistics that measures the number of tourist homes in Spain estimates that, as of February 2024, there were 351,389 accommodations of these characteristics in the country, of which almost 70% are concentrated in Andalusia, Comunitat Valenciana, Catalonia and the Canary Islands.
Currently, this statistic, which the INE launched in 2020 and updates every six months, is the closest thing to an official figure at the national level, although there are autonomous communities that manage their own data, with habitual discrepancies both upwards and downwards with respect to the INE.
In addition, the Government expects to launch a state registry in the coming months to unify all this numerical and methodological information.
According to the INE, the coast (Mediterranean, in particular) and the islands are the great granary of tourist housing, which reaches a considerable relative weight in the real estate park of numerous small and medium-sized towns. In Yaiza, a municipality on the island of Lanzarote with 17,415 registered inhabitants, 22.5% of the homes are dedicated to tourist use.
Not surprisingly, the autonomous communities with the highest number of tourist homes are, in this order, Andalusia (82,454), Comunitat Valenciana (59,413), Catalonia (52,598) and the Canary Islands (46,784).
They are followed at a certain distance by Illes Balears (25,073), Madrid (19,456) and Galicia (17,883), while on the other side of the spectrum, except for the autonomous cities, are La Rioja (1,263), Navarra (1,583) and Extremadura (1,759).
The classification by municipalities is led by three capitals, Madrid (16,100), Barcelona (8,842) and Málaga (7,038), and in the following positions appear other large cities such as València (6,769) or Seville (6,171) but, above all, coastal towns of Málaga (Marbella, 6,994; Mijas, 4,229), Alicante (Torrevieja, 4,454; Dénia, 3,608) and the Canary Islands (Arona, 4,013; Adeje, 3,800; La Oliva, 3,678).
In contrast, the provincial capitals with the fewest tourist homes are Palencia (41), Guadalajara (46), Lleida (54), Huesca (63), Badajoz (68), Ciudad Real (83), Soria (112), Teruel (130), Segovia (138), Ávila (154), Jaén (176), Vitoria-Gasteiz (177) and Huelva (183).
It must be taken into account that all these numbers do not necessarily reflect regularized situations. Suffice it as an example the case of Madrid capital, which according to the INE has 16,100 tourist apartments but has just over 1,000 municipal licenses in force.
