Southern Spain continues to be very attractive to all visitors
coming to Spain
The latest data from the UNWTO – Word Tourism Organisation –
ranks Spain as the third in global tourism rankings for 2016.
The data showed that 68.2 million visitors flocked to Spain last
year, putting it behind the USA (with 77.5 million visitors), and the
first-place France, which saw a total of 84.5 million visitors from overseas.
The statistics from the UNWTO are a little different from
other metrics as they record every visitor from a foreign country, rather than
just legitimate tourists booking an overnight stay at the very least. This is
the likely reason that France came in first, as many people pass through the
country on their journeys to surrounding countries.
This doesn’t mean that France doesn’t have a strong tourism
market though, it just means that France – which finds itself in the middle of
the UK, Italy, Belgium, and Germany – is always going to deal with a lot of
‘visitors’.
Spain – on the other hand – has land borders with just
Portugal, France, and Andorra – and it isn’t as large or as populated as France
is. The UNWTO also published a separate set of data about the number of
tourists per resident. This metric saw Spain beat France; drawing 1.4 tourists
for every resident, beating the 1.25 France scored.
An interesting note is that Andorra – that small
principality between Spain and France – that topped the charts for
tourists-per-resident; drawing in a massive 33.5 tourists per resident.
As far as overall numbers go, Spain is just in front of
China (56.9 million overseas visitors during 2016), Italy (50.7 million) and
Turkey (39.4 million). The UK came in eighth for the total number of visitors,
pulling in 33.4 million tourists during the year; just behind the 35 million of
seventh-place Germany.
The top ten was completed with Mexico in ninth with 32.1
million tourists and Russia in tenth with 31.3 million.
The Spanish tourism sector is expected to continue to grow
this year; growing 3.2% over 2016 figures. Southern Spain and the costa del sol breaking all records.
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Southern Spain continues to be very attractive to all visitors
coming to Spain
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