Staff Reporter
A HUGE 82.8 million foreign tourists visited Spain in 2018, new figures have revealed.
Beating 2017’s figure by 1.1%, it was the sixth record-breaking year in a row for Spain, despite renewed competition from the likes of Turkey, Tunisia and Greece.
The huge number of visitors also spent €89.9 billion in the country, a 3.3% increase on the year before, according to the National Statistics Institute (INE).
The figures are a positive sign for the industry, showing that visitor numbers are not expanding massively and risking over-saturation.
Meanwhile, the amount of money tourists are spending is increasing healthily, with the average daily spend by individual tourists growing 7.4% to €146.
And despite the number of British visitors declining by 1.6%, they were by far the biggest foreign group with 18.5 million visiting Spain in 2018.
The number of Germans dropped by 4.1% to 11.4 million while Scandinavian visitor numbers also dropped by 0.7% to 5.7 million.
Spain was able to pick up the slack thanks to a spike in other markets.
Visitors from the US grew by 11.8% to reach just under three million while Russian tourists jumped by 6.3% to 1.2 million.
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