SIZZLING: Benalmadena beach during summer

A HUGE 82.8 million foreign tourists visited Spain in 2018, new figures have revealed. 

Beating 2017’s figure by 1.1%, it was the sixth record-breaking year in a row for Spain, despite renewed competition from the likes of Turkey, Tunisia and Greece.

The huge number of visitors also spent €89.9 billion in the country, a 3.3% increase on the year before, according to the National Statistics Institute (INE).

The figures are a positive sign for the industry, showing that visitor numbers are not expanding massively and risking over-saturation.

Meanwhile, the amount of money tourists are spending is increasing healthily, with the average daily spend by individual tourists growing 7.4% to €146.

And despite the number of British visitors declining by 1.6%, they were by far the biggest foreign group with 18.5 million visiting Spain in 2018.

The number of Germans dropped by 4.1% to 11.4 million while Scandinavian visitor numbers also dropped by 0.7% to 5.7 million.

Spain was able to pick up the slack thanks to a spike in other markets.

Visitors from the US grew by 11.8% to reach just under three million while Russian tourists jumped by 6.3% to 1.2 million.