According to Palma Town Hall’s latest figures, 484,039 people are registered as residents. Spain’s National Statistics Institute (INE) gives a different figure – 443,196. This is a discrepancy that raises a question. Does anyone know for certain what the population of Palma is? There are differences for other Spanish cities, but Palma is an extreme example. Take Murcia for instance. A municipal register of 479,491 versus an INE 479,405; eighty-six rather than getting on for 41,000. The Palma figure places the city above Murcia in
the ranking of Spain’s largest cities – seventh rather than eighth. How does this come about? The INE explains that at the beginning of each year, the 8,000-plus municipalities in Spain send it the data of those registered, which are compared with other municipalities. This is in order to corroborate that people haven’t moved, given that there are municipalities which are “not very agile” when it comes to deregistering residents who have left. Data for the more than 49 million inhabitants of Spain are cross-checked.
“The best way to know that there is no duplication is to look at the most recently deregistered, because we have mechanisms that inform us when there are duplicate people in two different places.” Here may be one reason, the institute pointing out that discrepancies tend to be greatest in “very touristic cities”. Palma’s case is “a phenomenon similar to that of the cities of Alicante and Marbella, which have a very large floating population”. The INE adds that there is an expiration date in
the statistics for non-EU foreign residents, whose data must be renewed every two years. In the case of the EU, the data are updated every five years. “It is the town hall which has to contact these people”, so that they remain registered and do not disappear from the statistics. Differences in population figures have consequences in terms of the planning of public services, infrastructure, transport, health and housing. Determining how many people actually live in Palma has become a key issue in measuring the
needs of a city that continues to grow. And this all fuels the debate about whether the resources and funding that Palma receives correspond to the reality of a city with a population burden greater than that reflected in the official statistics, i.e. those of the National Statistics Institute.
Palma population, INE, municipal register, residents, public services planning, floating population, tourism cities, Murcia comparison, Alicante, Marbella