Between January and November last year, foreign tourism in the Balearics fell by 0.8% to just under 13.6 million tourists. The latest figures from the National Statistics Institute’s Frontur and Egatur surveys of foreign tourist movement and spending show that although there was a slight fall in tourist numbers, spending was up 1.1% to 14,734 million euros.
The Balearics, as is always the case, received the second highest number of foreign tourists over the first eleven months of 2019. Catalonia, which attracts more tourists than any other region of Spain, had almost 18.4 million tourists, an increase of 0.8%. The Canary Islands, in third spot, suffered a 4.4% decrease to just over 11.9 million.
Nationally, there were 79.4 million tourists. This was an increase of 1.2%. Spending rose three per cent to 87,265 million euros. For the eleven months as a whole, the UK had the largest share of the foreign tourism market with 17.29 million tourists, a fall of 2.15%. The German market fell 1.83% to 10.7 million, with the French down 1.3% to 10.6 million.
In November alone, there was an increase in tourist numbers of 2.8% to 4.7 million. The UK provided just over 875,000 of these, which represented a decrease of more than six per cent compared with November 2018. The largest increase was for French tourists - up more than 20% to 576,020.
Foreign tourism in the Balearics in November was down 2.8% to 182,833. The Canaries had the highest number of tourists - 1.17 million, a fall of one per cent.
Andalusia and Catalonia registered small increases of under two per cent, while Valencia was up almost ten per cent to 545,604 tourists.