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Despite the worsening economic situation there is a marked upward trend in the real estate sector with very strong demand and a notable rise in prices. For its part, the supply of new housing is being affected by the war in Ukraine as this has pushed up construction costs even further and aggravated the material supply problems due to bottlenecks in global value chains. Consequently, the misalignment between the demand and supply of housing has intensified, with the result that house prices are likely to continue rising. However, there are several counteracting factors that should help to curb the growth in demand and prices over the medium term, including the impact of inflation on real household income and the ECB’s interest rate hikes.

House prices and the number of sales have surged since mid-last year in Spain, although there are significant geographical differences. In 2024, house prices grew more vigorously in the most expensive areas, thus widening the price gap between municipalities and regions, and this is causing some of the demand to begin to shift towards more affordable areas. At the provincial level, temperature could be a relevant factor: sales are growing more rapidly in the cooler regions of the Northwest of the peninsula, while the traditional tourist areas are experiencing a more gradual increase in demand. In addition, the sharp rise in house prices in the major cities is causing a shift in housing demand towards more affordable peripheral areas, where house prices are expected to experience rapid growth in 2025.

Repeating tourists are one of the keys to the success of Spain’s tourism sector, but climate change puts their loyalty at risk. In this article we present a highly innovative analysis using data on payments made with foreign cards on CaixaBank POS terminals, which allows us to identify the international tourists who visited Spain in the high season, both in 2022 and in 2023.

The severe restrictions imposed to contain the spread of COVID-19 have resulted in an unprecedented drop in consumption and thereby a record rise in household savings. A large part of these new savings has been involuntary, caused by the impossibility of maintaining the usual level of consumption. According to our estimates, the lifting of restrictions that started in May will encourage part of these involuntary savings to be spent on consumption, this being one of the keys to a rapid recovery of consumption in 2021.

In the course of 2021 we have seen that, in the wake of the pandemic, a misalignment has emerged in the real estate sector between a demand that has recovered very quickly and a supply that is more dependent on structural factors and therefore continues to lag behind. As a result of this misalignment, house prices have started an upward trend which may continue to some extent in the coming quarters as a result of higher production costs in the sector and problems with the supply of certain raw materials. Nevertheless, in the medium term, as new supply enters the market and tensions in global supply chains ease, prices should return to a growth rate that is more in line with the trend in household income.

Between 2019 and 2025, Spain's manufacturing industry has grown at a similar rate to overall GDP, despite the impact of the pandemic and the energy crisis. This strong performance stands in contrast to the stagnation and decline seen in the industrial sector in the main European economies, and marks a departure from the trend of the last two decades, when its share of Spain's GDP fell from 16.7% to 10.8%. In this article we examine some of the drivers behind this turnaround in the Spanish industrial sector, most notably energy prices and productivity.

Tourism ended this year’s summer season in great shape with international tourist arrivals coming very close to the records set in 2019, a year that was extremely positive for the industry. Domestic tourism has also continued to post very good figures. However, the macroeconomic scenario represents a risk for the trend in tourism activity over the coming quarters due to high inflation and the economic slowdown in Europe. Nevertheless, we believe that tourism demand still enjoys significant levers for growth in the coming year and we therefore expect the sector to complete its recovery in 2023.

Consumption in Spain is recovering faster than in previous crises. This is highlighted in the consumption tracker produced by CaixaBank Research based on internal data (available in Spanish: Monitor de Consumo). In the month of October, our consumption indicator was already 13% higher than in the same month in 2019. 

We identify the macroeconomic factors that affect the evolution of international tourism in Spain, including income growth in the source countries, inflation, geopolitical risk and exchange rates, and we estimate how many international tourists will visit Spain in 2024.

In the current expansionary cycle of the Spanish real estate market, there is a marked increase in the dispersion of house prices across the country, unlike in the real estate boom prior to 2008. Since 2015, tourist municipalities and large cities have led the growth in prices. In contrast, rural areas and small towns have experienced more moderate price increases. This behaviour reinforces the view that, in this cycle, price formation is responding to the specific supply and demand dynamics of each area. In major cities, the strong price pressures in the centres are spreading to increasingly municipalities in the metropolitan areas.

One of the determining factors of the economic scenario is the impact of the ECB’s interest rate hikes on the consumption and investment decisions taken by economic agents. In this article, we examine the financial position of the different branches of Spain’s manufacturing industry in an attempt to determine to what extent they’re exposed to this tightening of financial conditions.

The hospitality sector was among those hardest hit by the consequences of the pandemic as it was at the epicentre of the social distancing measures used to contain the spread of COVID-19. Although official indicators point to the sector’s clear recovery in 2022, this has not been across the board. An analysis of CaixaBank’s internal data reveals the great differences that exist within the sector, with one part that has greatly improved its situation compared with 2019 and another, non-too negligible part that is still encountering difficulties.

The publication of the latest agricultural census by Spain’s National Statistics Institute, corresponding to 2020, not only allows us to describe exhaustively how the Spanish agricultural sector has evolved in recent decades in supply terms but also to detect any structural changes and predict new trends, strengths and weaknesses. The typical farm is still characterised by being small, economically modest and run primarily by a relatively older male, with little generational renewal, one of the major handicaps facing the sector. However, successive censuses reveal a gradual process of increased concentration among farms, which are becoming larger and more productive, as well as a greater presence of women in the sector.

Although the summer months continue to account for a large part of tourist flows, travel outside the high season is growing more rapidly, especially among Europeans and among Spaniards with medium and high income levels. 

The Spanish economy is facing 2026 from a strong starting position, supported by the momentum of buoyant growth in 2025, a dynamic labour market, strong domestic demand and relatively contained inflation despite the energy shock. The outbreak of the war in Iran has introduced a new supply shock, increasing uncertainty and forcing us to revise downwards the projected GDP growth for this year to 2.1%, 0.3 pps below the previous forecast. In any case, the intensity of the slowdown is expected to vary depending on the sector. Manufacturing sectors, which are more energy-intensive, outward-facing, and with a weaker cyclical position, will be the most affected. In contrast, services and other activities linked to domestic demand are starting from a more solid position and are less exposed.