Are Americans welcome in Spain?

There is no official "welcome" statistic — kindness and hospitality are not things a census measures. What the data can tell you is how routine immigration is here: 19.3% of Spain's residents (9,464,176 people, 2025) were born outside Spain. Americans are a very small part of that — 76,180 U.S.-born residents, roughly 0.8% of the foreign-born population. So "welcome" is less about Americans specifically and more about a country where nearly one in five residents is an immigrant. On that structural measure, newcomers are deeply normal in Spain.

No dataset measures sentiment, so anyone claiming a definitive yes or no is guessing. The closest objective proxy is behaviour: the U.S.-born population of Spain grew +40% between 2021 and 2025, and Americans keep choosing it. For context, the largest foreign-origin group in Spain is Latin American (9.5% of the population), reflecting shared language and history — not any hostility toward Americans, who are a small and growing minority.

76,180 U.S.-born residents as of 2025, up from 54,406 in 2021 — a +40% increase (INE census, table 66322). Important caveat: this counts people born in the USA, not U.S. citizens, which overcounts citizenship by roughly a third nationally because it includes U.S.-born children of Spaniards who returned home.

They cluster in two kinds of place: big cities (Madrid has 14,538 U.S.-born residents, the most of any municipality) and a handful of affluent suburbs and coastal towns. Most of interior Spain has almost no American residents. See the full census-backed map and the 50 most American towns on our flagship page.

That depends on your priorities, and we won't pretend a dataset can decide it for you. What we can give you is the honest, town-level baseline: how many Americans already live where you're considering, how fast that's growing, and how internationally mixed each place is. Start with the map, then read the methodology so you know exactly what the numbers do and don't say.