In the third quarter of this year it has been ranked as the fifth most visited community, improving both the percentages of the spring and the same period of 2020 and already surpassing the pre-pandemic data.
The latest data just released by the National Institute of Statistics on the evolution of tourism in Spain again leave good news for the Galician sector. The survey of tourism among residents in Spain for the third quarter of this year shows how Galicia climbs a position among the preferred destinations for Spanish tourists to rank as the fifth community that received the most visitors in the whole of July, August and September, with a total of 3,520,573 people.
This figure not only represents a percentage increase compared to the previous quarter, with Galicia going from accounting for 5% of national tourism to 6.2% of the total, but also demonstrates once again the greater capacity for recovery of the tourism sector in the region. The 3.5 million visitors that Galicia received during the last quarter represent an increase of more than 800,000 compared to the same quarter last year, which puts the percentage increase between that period and this year at 30 %, almost 7 points higher than the national average.
In addition, these data allow the Galician tourism sector to also recover pre-pandemic figures, since in the third quarter of 2019, before the explosion of covid, the total number of visitors that Galicia had received stood at 3,424,200, almost 100,000 less than now. By contrast, in the national total, the number of visitors for the third quarter of this year (57,034,795) is still below that recorded before the pandemic (61,116,470).
Increase in spending per person
This evolution of the sector is also reflected in the statistics on average daily expenditure per person. During the third quarter of this year, the figure in Galicia was 47 euros, placing it in seventh position in the ranking by region, while a year ago it was ninth with only 36 euros. Also in this case, the pre-pandemic figure is already exceeded, which in the third quarter of 2019 was 42 euros on average per person per day.