Counting heads: Spain has most uninhabited land in EU says new report

MANY countries across the globe are facing overpopulation concerns, but Spain is not among them. The latest report released by Eurostat, the European Commission’s statistics office, on Friday, March 31 revealed that Spain has the highest ratio of unoccupied land on the continent.

Spain ranked in first place with 426,000 kilometres squared of unoccupied land, followed by Sweden which has 362,000 kilometres squared of uninhabited land. The report also offered some fascinating insights into the picture of population and housing in the European Union. With over 4.4 million cells, measuring one kilometre squared each, covering the EU’s vast territory, only 1.8 million cells are inhabited, while a whopping 2.6 million cells are uninhabited!

However, in an interesting twist, Spain also made the other extreme of the list with Madrid being recorded as the most densely populated area in the EU. With a staggering 6.7 million residents, Spain’s capital is the most densely populated region, followed by Barcelona and Rome.

On the other hand, the smallest and least populated region of the EU is the Spanish Canary island of El Hierro, with just over 11,000 residents.