Spain beat another tourism record in 2025, welcoming 96.8 million foreign visitors for the year, according to new figures from the National Statistics Institute. With income up proportionately more than visitor numbers, the Spanish Ministry of Tourism is holding up the data as evidence of sustainable approaches in action.
Tourism in Spain has been booming, hitting records for the past three years, and handling 94 million foreign guests in 2024. Representing 12.6% of gross domestic product, the Spanish industry ranks as UN Tourism’s third top earner, after the UK and French sectors. However, that success has been accompanied by rising discontent among Spanish residents, who complain of overcrowding, rising house prices, a lack of housing stock, unfair use of scarce resources like water for tourism infrastructure, and general increases in the cost of living that mean they cannot afford to go on holiday in their own resorts.
But while 2025 saw a 3.4% increase in visitor numbers year-on-year, that came alongside a bigger proportional rise of 6.8% in terms of the income they generated. The World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) estimated the economic impact of tourism at €260 billion (including direct, indirect, and induced spending), 4.7 % more than in 2024. Spain’s Ministry of Tourism has hailed those figures as evidence of a tourism model that is becoming “more sustainable and based on prioritising quality over quantity.”
Pursuing “quality over quantity” is a policy seen in action in Spanish cities that have taken steps to cap the number of licences that are issued for short-term rental, provided guidelines for visitors on how to meet etiquette expectations, and tightened up rules about behaviour in public places, banning smoking on beaches, for example.
Spain’s record year was matched by a record year for travel and tourism globally. The worldwide industry employed one in three people in 2025, the WTTC says, generating €10 trillion or 10.3% of the global economy, a year-on-year growth rate of 6.7%. In Europe, tourism contributed €2.5 trillion, or 10% to the region’s GDP, putting growth at 5.1% year-on-year for the region, and 11.6% compared to the pre-COVID benchmark year 2019.
Over 1.5 billion people undertook international travel in 2025, 80 million more than in 2024, and averaging 219,000 international arrivals per day, which the WTTC is taking as a sign of the sector’s global recovery.
“We are in a better position than before the pandemic and better than in 2024,” said Gloria Guevara, WTTC president and CEO, noting that if travel and tourism “ were a country, we would be the third largest economy in the world,” says Gloria Guevara, the organisation’s president and CEO.
