The foreign community of Barcelona is growing

Barcelona has 1,660,314 people registered, according to the data of the latest municipal register published by Barcelona City Council. The population has been rising slightly for five years, mainly due to migration, but this trend has been broken for the first time this year. The city has lost 6,200 inhabitants in one year, 0.4% of the population. This is a direct consequence of the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on demographics: mortality has shot up, births have decreased and migratory flows have slowed down.

The Spanish population has fallen by 1.3%, but Barcelona has managed to maintain its ability to attract people from other countries. The percentage of foreign population living across the city is of 22.4% (371,527 out of a total of 1,660,314 inhabitants), which is an increase of 2.9% with respect to the previous year. If we take into account only the place of birth, the number of people of foreign origin living in the city is even higher with 480,721 people, but 28.1% of these already have dual Spanish nationality.     

Of the total number of foreigners registered in Barcelona, 68,272 (18.4%) live in the Eixample district, while in Ciutat Vella there are 57,734 (15.5%), followed by Sant Martí with 50,883 (13.7%).

The Italian and British community is growing

People of 179 nationalities already live in Barcelona, apart from the Spanish. The city has gone in just a quarter of a century from having a very homogeneous population, with a foreign community in the 1991 of only 1.5% of the total number of registered people, to the current 22.4% of foreign residents. 

Regarding the profile of foreigners, the main countries of origin are Argentina, Colombia, the United Kingdom, Italy, Pakistan, Peru and Honduras. 

The Italians are the nationality that has grown the most in absolute numbers (1,896 newly registered) during the last year. This increase continues the upward trend of recent years, which has made the Italian nationality the most common in the city after Spain, with 41,759 people registered. 

Colombians and Britons are the second and third nationalities to increase their presence in the city over the last year. After Brexit, a very large number of British people arrived in Barcelona. In the previous 2019 census, Britons occupied the eighth position, but now they have climbed to third place, going from 9,025 in 2020 to 10,086 in 2021, according to census figures.

In contrast, with the current crisis, the arrival of citizens from America and Eastern Europe has fallen. The nationalities that have decreased the most are Bolivia, Ecuador, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Romania and Armenia, in that order.