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Galicia ended the year as the seventh community with the highest number of workers employed in the sector: more than 107,000.

Last year’s tally of data from the tourism sector once again offers new results and conclusions. This time they come from the Encuesta de Población Activa (EPA) and Turespaña and reflect the positive evolution that employment in the sector recorded during the final stretch of 2021. Thus, although during the fourth quarter of the year the traditional decline in the number of employed persons with respect to the previous quarter (July, August and September and, therefore, the busiest quarter for the sector) was maintained, the comparison with respect to the final stretch of 2020 shows that in Spain as a whole the total number of employed persons in the tourism sector amounted to almost 2,550,000 people, which represented a year-on-year increase of 12.2%.

The communities with the greatest tourist flows (Canary Islands, Andalusia, Madrid, Balearic Islands, Valencia and Catalonia) are the ones that have driven this recovery of employment in the sector, but the increase has been generalised, with La Rioja being the only territory that closed 2021 with a loss of employed workers in the year-on-year comparison. In the case of Galicia, the growth in the last three months of last year with respect to the final stretch of 2020 has been more modest than the average, standing at 2.2%, resulting in a final figure of 107,355 workers employed in the tourism sector, 4.4% of the national total. Of those employed in Galicia, slightly more than 83,000 are salaried workers and the remaining 24,000 are self-employed, although the behaviour was not the same between the two. Thus, the number of salaried employees in Galician tourism between the two periods increased by 5.6%, while the number of self-employed fell by 8.4%.

Catalonia (421,000), Madrid (402,000), Andalusia (397,000), Valencia (250,000), the Canary Islands (230,000) and the Balearic Islands (119,000) are the six communities that ended 2021 with more workers employed in the tourism sector than Galicia.

When compiling these statistics, the EPA counts as employed workers those who are affected by a temporary lay-off plan (ERTE) but with a commitment to return to their jobs once the period of suspension has ended.