Summer tourism figures in Spain

The record summer for tourism in Spain is reflected in the first collated data released by the National Statistics Office.

The headline figure shows that 10.5 million international tourists visited Spain in July alone.

This represents an increase of 10.1% compared with July 2016.

This continues the trend of the past 12 months, with records consistently being broken. For instance, both May and June of 2017 showed over 11% increases in visitors.

Spain has benefited from security concerns in other traditional holiday destinations and for many holidaymakers represents an easy choice for a summer break.

Any visitor to Spain will have noticed how busy the airports and holiday hotspots have been.

Many airlines put on extra flights and added routes.

The majority of visitors (75%) arranged their own holidays with package holidays showing a further decline.

Much of Europe now has the opportunity to visit parts of Spain that were previously inaccessible or hard to travel to.

Direct flights can be booked to Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao, Santander, Alicante, Balearic Islands, Canary Islands, Malaga, Seville, Santiago de Compostela, La Coruña, Girona, Valencia, Murcia, Oviedo, Granada and Almeria.

Marbella

This gives tremendous options for travellers and enables many people to discover new regions with variations on Spanish culture.

The figures for July 2017 showed that the traditional holiday destinations remain the strongest.

Cataluña is the most popular destination with over 2.5m tourists in July. The next busiest was the Balearic Islands with 2.4m visitors, followed by Andalucia and Valencia.