Tourism accounted for 11.6% of Spain‘s GDP in 2022, according to data from INE, the Spanish statistics office.
This is 3.9 percentage points higher than 2021.
Tourism was valued at €155.95 billion in Spain in 2022, and generated more than 1.9 million jobs, which equates to 9.3% of the total employment in the country.
Inbound tourism
Inbound tourists accounted for 54.1% of total tourism spend in Spain in 2022, which was 13.2 percentage points higher than in the previous year, and on a par with pre-pandemic numbers.
By contrast, inbound tourism spend in 2021 accounted for 40.9% of overall spend, while the previous year, it stood at 38.7% of total spend.
Tourists travelling to Spain from other countries spent €84.4 billion in 2022, compared to €38.5 billion in 2021, and €25.9 billion in 2020.
GDP contribution
In terms of the contribution that tourism made to Spain’s GDP in recent years, in the pre-pandemic year of 2019, it accounted for 12.6%. This dropped to just 6.0% in 2020, as COVID-19 took hold, recovering to 7.7% in 2021, before rising to 11.6% in 2022.
Tourism demand volume rose by 58.6% last year, INE added, up from an increase of 37.5% in 2021. In 2020, tourism demand volume fell by 54.9%.
