Catalonia, the third EU region with the most overnight stays by tourists

BarcelonaIn 2023, Catalonia was the third-most visited region in the European Union, based on the number of overnight stays. Only the Canary Islands and the Adriatic coast of Croatia recorded a higher number of overnight stays in tourist establishments in their respective territories, according to data from Eurostat, the statistical agency of the European Commission.

Thus, Catalonia closed 2023—for which data is available—with more than 85.6 million overnight stays booked from January to December, by both Spanish and international tourists in establishments in the sector, ranging from hotels and hostels to campsites and tourist apartments. The figure is slightly lower than that of Adriatic Croatia, with more than 87.3 million overnight stays, and well below that of the Canary Islands, which was the undisputed leader, with 95.5 million.

This places Catalonia as a tourist destination with more hotel nights than other European regions that, a priori, have a longer-established tourism industry. For example, the Ile-de-France region, which is mainly made up of the Paris metropolitan area, ranked below Catalonia, with 85.1 million overnight stays.

Without going any further, Catalonia recorded more overnight stays than any region in Italy, the country where tourism was born at the end of the 18th century: Veneto, home to the tourist-heavy Venice, recorded 71.8 million overnight stays; Tuscany (with Florence, Siena, and Pisa), 46 million; Lazio, the region of Rome, had around 45.7 million; and Lombardy (home to Milan), 41.7 million. Italy's two largest Mediterranean islands, Sicily and Sardinia, also ranked below Catalonia, as did Liguria.

However, if we add to the data for Catalonia the more than 11.2 million overnight stays in Northern Catalonia (which administratively corresponds to the French department of the Pyrénées-Orientales), the entire Catalan territory would reach 96.9 million overnight stays and would be the main tourist destination in the EU in this area. Regarding other Catalan-speaking territories, both the Balearic Islands and the Valencian Community appear among the highest, with 68.7 million and 52.4 million overnight stays, respectively.

Overnight stays are not the only way to calculate the weight of tourism in a region, but they do indicate the sector's influence on the local economy. In this sense, Catalonia is also among the top European regions in terms of the number of visitors, although this figure is more complicated for statistical agencies and tourism organizations to calculate. Catalonia also leads in hotel and campsite accommodations.

In fact, the tourism sector represents approximately 14% of Catalonia's economic activity. The Catalan economy's heavy dependence on this sector, which has lower productivity levels, on average, than other industrial and service activities, is also a factor. However, the Catalan Minister of Business and Employment, Miquel Sàmper, has already He declared last month that in Catalonia "there is no alternative" to tourism, despite defending "the shift from a model in which we counted how many tourists came to each country to a model in which we considered what we wanted this tourism to be."

Predominance of the coast

Catalonia has one trait in common with most of the European regions that appear at the top of the ranking: it is a coastal region in the Mediterranean basin. Among the top 20 regions in terms of overnight stays, 13 meet this requirement. Two, the Canary Islands and Aquitaine, in southern France (which includes Bordeaux and the French Basque Country), are also coastal regions, but in this case, the Atlantic. The rest have high levels of tourism because they either have large tourist cities, such as North Holland—home to Amsterdam—or are winter and mountain tourism destinations, such as the Austrian Tyrol or the French region of Rhône-Alpes. Upper Bavaria and Lombardy meet both criteria, as they comprise a significant portion of the German and Italian Alps, respectively, and have the cities of Munich and Milan as their capitals.

This factor also explains why the Canary Islands top the ranking, as the archipelago's mild climate allows for year-round sun and beach tourism, one of the most popular forms of tourism. However, in the case of the Canary Islands, there are other factors. One is that having the status of a peripheral European region allows the Canary Islands government to replace VAT with a lower special consumption tax, which lowers prices. Furthermore, since flights from the north and center of the continent to the Canary Islands are longer than within Europe, many visitors take advantage of the opportunity to stay longer than in closer destinations, where weekend getaways are easier.

The ranking includes the 237 regions of the second level of the EU Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS-2), which in the case of the Spanish State correspond to the autonomous communities. The regions are, therefore, from the 27 member states of the Union and do not include those of other non-EU countries, such as the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, or Turkey. Thus, very popular destinations such as London and Istanbul are excluded from the ranking because they are not part of the EU.