More population, lower density of bank branches. Catalonia, along with Andalusia and Madrid, the most populated autonomous communities, has the fewest bank branches per 100,000 inhabitants, according to data from the Bank of Spain. And regions like Extremadura, La Rioja, and Aragon, with smaller or more dispersed populations, are among those with the most. However, in both cases, the reduction in networks and supply, with the disappearance of savings banks through their transformation or absorption by other entities, has been drastic since the peak reached in 2008, the year the financial crisis erupted.

One of the great mysteries kept under lock and key by the Ministry of Finance is that of the adjusted population. It's the key tool for determining each autonomous community's share of funding, but calculating it becomes a real puzzle. People are assigned different values depending on their age, whether they live in a town or a city, whether they are unemployed, or whether they live on an island—among other factors. Some autonomous communities benefit more from the adjusted population, such as Extremadura, La Rioja, and Cantabria, while others... They would do much better if they used the actual population....like Catalonia. That's why every time a proposed funding model is presented, a flurry of figures ensues, depending on what's being compared. Below, we review the main figures before Wednesday's meeting between regional finance ministers and the Minister of Finance.

When I was eight years old, the journalist Alfredo Amestoy, with his characteristic hairstyle and glasses, presented a television program called 35 million Spaniards. Subtitle: looking at the peseta. How great his program was!

There are 8,113,490 of us Catalans in Catalonia. I don't know if we'll ever reach 10 million, but it seems absolutely reasonable to me that as a country, and especially the public authorities, we plan and anticipate what public services and infrastructure we will need when the time comes.

He landed in Catalonia from Serbia to work on construction sites. A much more lucrative source of income emerged: entering the drug business. And the money started rolling in. He and his compatriots lived in luxury apartments in the Poblenou area of Barcelona. They enjoyed a high standard of living that made them forget the risks they were taking. Until the summer of 2024, after two years of investigation, the National Police dismantled the network dedicated to the production and export of marijuana, with four large plantations spread across the country.

The impact of covid can already begin to be measured. The reading of the data of the Barcelona census shows that the pandemic has marked a historic peak of deaths in the city: 18,926; the highest figure since 1900 with the only exceptions of the years of the Civil War (28,000) and the Spanish flu (22,800). Last year 31.7% more people died than the previous year and covid was responsible for the fact that there were 4,305 more deaths than expected in the city taking into account the latest statistics.

The covid crisis has led some residents of big cities like Barcelona to look for a different way of life, in less dense environments, with more nature. For five years Barcelona has been gaining inhabitants in a moderate but constant way, mainly due to the arrival of foreign population -more than half of Barcelona's inhabitants were born outside the city-, but the pandemic has also marked a turning point in this trend and now the curve is declining. This has meant a drop of around 0.8% -with data closed in October-, which has not been seen for a decade. It is added to the excess mortality due to the pandemic, the brake on immigration -more people are leaving than arriving- and the fact that many Barcelona residents, now working from home, have sought more comfortable places to spend the months of restrictions. Some have moved to second homes in small beach towns or mountain areas, and others have moved to smaller residential towns.