Alicante, Córdoba and Barcelona are, in this order, the three large Spanish cities in which crime increased the most last year, according to the analysis of the data collected by all the police forces operating in Spanish territory and published by the Ministry of the Interior.
The Ministry's statistical portal, which compiles all known criminal acts throughout the year, reveals that of the 15 municipalities with the most population, only three saw the number of complaints decrease compared to the previous year. This is Valladolid, where crimes fell by 12.1% in 2023 compared to 2022 (from 11,250 to 9,889); Zaragoza, where the interannual decrease was 5.1% (from 25,788 to 24,475) and Vigo, a city in which 2% fewer criminal acts were recorded (from 12,456 to 12,206).
The other municipalities with the largest population in Spain present a negative balance, very much in line with the trend that indicates a recovery in criminal activity after the slowdown that occurred in 2020 and 2021 as a consequence of the pandemic and factors derived from it, such as the decrease in tourist arrivals.
In these dozen cities, the increases in the number of criminal acts known to the police range between 0.4% and 0.6% in Bilbao and Palma de Mallorca, respectively, and the largest increases occurred in Alicante (16, 4%), Córdoba (12.7%), Barcelona (10.8%), Seville (9.3%9 and Málaga (8.9%). In Madrid, during 2023, there was a moderate growth in crime compared to the previous year, estimated at 2.3%.
The 2023 balance sheet made public by the Ministry of the Interior confirms the enormous relative weight that theft, by far the most common type of crime, has in the perception and reality of citizen insecurity.
According to these statistics, in 2023 there were almost as many thefts in Barcelona as in Madrid. While in 2022 the difference between these two cities in this category was about 12,000 thefts, in 2023 the difference was reduced to less than 3,000. This is because while Barcelona registered an increase of 7.4%, Madrid experienced a decrease of 3.4%.
Statistics from the Ministry of the Interior indicate that in the Catalan capital a total of 85,369 thefts were reported last year, or rather it would be better to say thefts in which a complaint was filed. Taking it into account, 233.9 thefts on average per day or, what is perhaps more revealing of the dimension of the problem, almost 10 every hour. It is no consolation that last year's theft figures are still below those of 2018 (more than 109,000) or 2019, the year that political authorities usually resort to to establish advantageous comparisons.
Among the first five cities in Spain according to their population there is one, Seville, in which the increase in the number of thefts was greater than in Barcelona (8.1), while the one that presents a better balance in this top 5 is Zaragoza (- 12.5%).
