Spain becomes No. 3 destination for foreign tourists
Print Edition
Spain has retaken the number three spot in world tourism in 2013, overtaking China by luring a record 60.6 million international visitors.
Foreign tourist arrivals surged by 5.6 percent in the year, the government said yesterday, boosting Spain’s economy after a long, job-wrecking recession.
“The new figures for 2013 allow our country to retake the No 3 position in this indicator after having overtaken China,” Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy boasted.
Spain now stood behind only France with 83 million international tourist arrivals and the United States with 67 million.
Income from foreign tourists hit record levels, too, a significant contribution to the economy, which has just emerged from five years of stop-start recession that left the nation with a 26-percent unemployment rate.
Spending by international tourists in the first 11 months of 2013 surged by 8.7 percent from the same period of last year to 55.9 billion euros (US$76 billion), government figures showed.
Even without the official figures for the whole year, it is already possible to say that 2013 was a record in terms of tourism spending, the prime minister said.
British tourists led the way to Spain in 2013, with some 14.3 million of them accounting for 23.6 percent of all foreign tourists, said the report by Spain’s Industry, Energy and Tourism Ministry.
Next came Germany with 16.2 percent of the total, France with 15.7 percent, and Nordic countries with eight percent.
Russian tourists accounted for 2.6 percent of the total, but their numbers showed the biggest leap, soaring by 31.6 percent from the previous year.
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