The foreign tourists visiting Spain during first nine month months of 2018 accounted around 66.2 million.
The government published a communiqué containing data from two studies elaborated by the Spanish National Institute of Statistics (INE) into the arrival of foreign tourists and their spending.
Although the number of international and national tourists visiting Spain between January and September is unchanged from 2017, tourist spending increased by 2.5 percent over the first nine months of the year.
Spanish Secretary of State for Tourism Isabel Oliver gave a positive valuation of the data, saying it showed the stabilisation of the number of visitors and is accompanied by an important growth in tourist spending.
Of the 66.2 million visitors to Spain, almost 15 million came from the United Kingdom, with 9.43 million from France and 9.1 million from Germany. Meanwhile there was an 8.7 percent growth in the number of visitors from the United States and a 5.3 percent increase in the number of Russians.
The Catalan region continues to be the most important tourist destination in Spain. Only the Catalan region accounted 15.4 million visitors in the first nine months of the year, followed by the Balearic Islands with 12.2 million tourists and the Canary Islands with 10.05 million visitors.
A total of 8.9 million tourists visited Spain during September, which is 0.5 percent more than September 2017. They spent a total of 9.543 million euros (10.86 million U.S. dollars), 0.7 percent higher than in 2017, with the average visitor spending 147 euros (167.3 U.S. dollars) per person per day.
The year 2017 saw 82 million tourists spend holidays in Spain, making the country the second most important destination in the world, beaten only by France.
Tags: spain, spain tourism, Tourism
