Spain tourism 2023: record year in Asturias, doubts in the Canary Islands

Summer 2023 splits Spanish tourism: north packed, south uncertain

The summer season of 2023 closed with two incompatible versions. The official one boasted figures close to those before the pandemic. The on-the-ground one, the one you check by looking for parking on the coast, spoke of a weak August in the Canary Islands, of rooms at 150 euros a night and of a European middle class that, according to several participants, is cutting back or looking for cheaper destinations due to a lack of income. Tourism, the activity that sustains half the country every July and August, reached September without anyone agreeing on whether it had been a good year or the warning sign of something worse.

August employment and suspicion over temporary workers

The August affiliation figure was the trigger for the distrust. Some maintain that the Government would have reclassified temporary workers in the statistics so that they would no longer appear as unemployed and would appear as permanently employed. It is an accusation with no published evidence, and precisely for that reason it demands a response with broken-down figures rather than a party line.

Was it the worst tourist summer in years?

There is no single figure that confirms it, and that is why the discussion has become entrenched. What there are is signals pointing in opposite directions. In Torremolinos, one of the classic sun-and-beach destinations, July and August were, according to those who live there, unbearable: everything packed to bursting and with a low-spending visitor with just-about manners. By contrast, one participant takes it for granted that Asturias has had the best summer in its history. And in the Pyrenees, fifteen days of August with the villages empty. The national average is a poor substitute for each territory.

Less Canary Islands and more north: the heat redraws the map

The explanation that has gained the most ground is climatic. Anyone who spent the summer in southern Tenerife maintains that they cannot remember a non-elbichito year with so few people and that only some days resembled the old times; their infallible thermometer, how difficult it was to park, pointed to a weak season. At the same time a new phenomenon began to circulate: the tourist from central and northern Europe who avoids heatwaves and seeks cool temperatures. Hence the full house in the Cantabrian region and the pull of domestic tourism along the northern coast.

It is not a uniform picture. In a Levante resort occupancy was packed to the rafters and in much of the Mediterranean the feeling of saturated streets is repeated. The result is an unbalanced map: some destinations are hitting record highs while others discover that their season is no longer what it was. The Camino de Santiago provides its own indicator: Americans ended up as the second foreign nationality, just a few figures behind the Italians, a profile of upper-middle class that spends. Although there are also those who read the pilgrim boom the other way: so many people on foot means money doesn't stretch any further.

Cruise passengers and arrivals: the figures that inflate themselves

Another point of friction is what counts as a tourist. The 100,000 daily cruise passengers who, according to one participant, disembark for four hours, take a stroll and return to the ship to eat, inflate arrival statistics without barely leaving money in the destination, according to those who observe the phenomenon from the coast. Another reading suggests that part of the increase in international entries does not respond to holidays as such, but to prolonged stays declared as tourism. With that material, any year-on-year comparison forces you to read the small print.

The price of a night and the spending that doesn't arrive

If income has not risen above inflation, there has been no real increase in activity, and several testimonies from the sector point to declines. According to a participant with contacts on the Costa Brava, daily spending per tourist fell by around 5% compared to the previous year; once inflation is discounted, the profit after paying for everything is little. Add to that the return of the ICO ELbichito loans, which are beginning to mature, and a hospitality sector that even asked for half-million-euro loans to survive the closures.

And at the other end of the chain, the price. A hotel night at 150 euros for accommodation only turns any family getaway into an exercise in arithmetic. There are bad seasons because nobody comes and bad seasons because people come who cannot spend. This summer both have coincided.

Why the macro data doesn't match the street

The counterpoint comes from the institutions. AIReF forecast 0.1% growth for the second quarter and the final figure was 0.5%, with the first at 0.6% and a Banco de España forecast of 2.3% for 2023 as a whole. With that momentum, the last two quarters should not turn out badly. The nuance matters: growing little does not miccionan that unemployment does not rise in specific sectors, and the high season is precisely where the most fragile employment is concentrated. Quarterly growth of 0.5% is compatible with a bad August in hospitality.

With these ingredients, the matter gets stuck at a point that is simple to state and difficult to close: there is no occupancy statistic that summarises the summer of each province. And as long as the comparison is made against an exceptional year or against a bad one, each side will find the figure that suits it.

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This analysis is based on monitoring the 2023 tourist season and on the growth data published by the institutions cited.