Catalonia and its major city Barcelona has enjoyed a strong uplift in both business and tourism numbers in 2018. The city’s entrepreneurs created more than 4,800 new companies in the first quarter, well above the level for the final three months of 2017.
Spanish businesses blossomed across the nation, the latest figures show, with a rise of 24 per cent in new company registrations compared with the fourth quarter of last year. Property development is the number one most popular sector for these new enterprises, followed by food and beverage companies and then general trading entities.
Catalonia’s unemployment figures continued to fall in March this year, with 6,700 fewer people out of work than in February. This is in line with the overall Spanish jobless situation: the country now has the lowest unemployment figures for nine years.
The Catalonia region accounts for a quarter of all tourists visiting Spain, figures from the latest Frontur survey reveal. It attracted more than a million international tourists in February 2018, an increase of almost 30,000 on the same period in 2017. Most of these visitors came from neighbouring France, whereas in Spain as a whole, the most populous nation of visitors is the UK, with 20.5 per cent of tourist numbers.
