Monitoring consumption in over 200 Spanish towns and cities in real time

We expand our consumption indicator with data on in-person card payments in retail establishments and withdrawals at ATMs for each of Spain’s municipalities with over 35,000 inhabitants.

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Josep Mestres Domènech

Zoel Martín Vilató

April 22nd, 2025

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Escaparate de un comercio en una calle de Euskadi. Photo by Marco de Luca on Unsplash

Big data allows us to track developments in the economy at a level of detail and with an immediacy until recently unimaginable. An example of this is the CaixaBank Research Real-Time Economics portal, a pioneering tool for monitoring the Spanish economy using internal CaixaBank data, aggregated and duly anonymised.1 Consumption is one of the areas analysed on the basis of payments and cash withdrawals carried out with bank cards.2 Until now, data on consumption trends were available at an aggregate level for Spain as a whole and for all autonomous community regions.

Now we have added to the portal data on consumption in each of Spain’s municipalities with over 35,000 inhabitants. In total, we track 207 municipalities, including all provincial capitals. Many of these cities are economic entities of considerable size, but there is often limited economic information about them, especially information with low latency that allows for near real-time monitoring.3 This new tool offers an indicator of spending in the municipality which reflects the local economic reality on the basis of high-quality data.

Consumption is identified based on in-person card spending and cash withdrawals carried out in each of these 207 Spanish towns and cities (see first chart). Thus, we include card spending and cash withdrawals carried out by both Spaniards and foreigners in order to take the pulse of consumption in a given municipality.4 Each month, and within just a few days following the end of the month, we will publish how in-person consumption is evolving in each municipality.

1. See the Focuses «Real-time economics: the new portal by CaixaBank Research» in the MR11/2022 and «What big data reveals about consumption in Spain» in the MR07/2024, for further details.
2. The available indicators are grouped into five areas: consumption, housing, tourism, wages and inequality. See the methodological document for further details on how the indicators are built and validated: https://www.caixabankresearch.com/es/nota-metodologica_rte.
3. An exception is the data on social security affiliation and registered unemployment at the municipal level, which are published monthly by the Social Security Institute and the State Employment Service (SEPE), respectively.
4. More specifically, we include in-person spending and cash withdrawals carried out in the municipality, either with cards issued by CaixaBank or, in the case of foreigners, transactions recorded on CaixaBank POS terminals and at CaixaBank ATMs. The location of the spending in a particular municipality is determined based on the location of the POS terminal or, when this is not available, based on the location of the establishment where the card transaction took place.

Spain: towns and cities available for monitoring consumption on the Real-Time Economics portal

Consumption in Spain increased 3.4% year-on-year in Q1 2025,5 slightly short of the 4.0% recorded in the previous quarter but still a relatively high growth rate.6 In particular, the growth of in-person consumption in the form of card payments and cash withdrawals, which we also monitor at the municipal level, remained at 1.9%, similar to that recorded in the previous quarter.

The map of consumption growth in the various municipalities included on the portal reveals the wide range of situations that cannot be appreciated with consumption data at the national level alone. As we can see in the second map, consumption in 2024 grew at a faster rate in the southern half of the peninsula and in the Balearic and Canary Islands, often in towns and cities that are popular with tourists. Several cities in northern Spain also recorded significant consumption growth, including Santiago de Compostela. In this city, spending rose by 4.5% in 2024, perhaps a prelude to a good jubilee year for consumption in the Galician capital.

5. Data up until 21 March. For more information, see the Consumption Tracker | CaixaBank Research.
6. This figure is slightly lower than that published by the National Statistics Institute for the nominal consumption series (+4.3% year-on-year in Q4 2024, with data unadjusted for seasonal or calendar effects). The two series differ in several respects. For example, our tracker only includes data on payments and cash withdrawals carried out by card, as well as direct debit payments, so it excludes the consumption of goods produced off-market, among others.

Spain: consumption growth in Spain’s main towns and cities in 2024

In fact, territorial differences do not only occur between different provinces, but also within provinces themselves. For example, in Barcelona we find both Ripollet, one of the 10 cities that grew the most in terms of consumption in 2024, and Gavà, which recorded the second biggest decrease. On the other hand, the classic rivalry between municipalities in the province ended with a tight victory for Sabadell, where consumption grew by 2.8% in 2024, beating its arch-rival Terrassa by 1 pp (1.8%).

Among the towns and cities where consumption grew the most last year, we find renowned tourist destinations, such as Estepona and Benidorm. So far this year, both locations have maintained a similar rate of growth and are still among the top 10 municipalities. At the other end of the spectrum, the municipality with over 35,000 inhabitants which recorded the worst change in consumption in 2024 was Paterna, with a decrease of 3.9%.

Although there may be a degree of variability from month to month due to the nature of the data, these indicators allow us to compare the different trends within a given territory. For instance, if we focus on the towns and cities in the Murcia region (see third chart), we can see how consumption growth in Alcantarilla is outpacing that of the other municipalities. On the other hand, we can also see the weakness of consumption in Mazarrón during the second half of 2024, as well as its rapid recovery since then.

At CaixaBank Research, we believe in the importance of providing high-quality economic information that is accessible to all. That is why we offer accurate and useful indicators that reflect the local and national economic reality on our Real-Time Economics portal.