Alicante residents frequently boast that there is no place in the world to live better than on their land, a statement that in recent times has been corroborated by various surveys carried out among natives from other latitudes who have chosen the Costa Blanca to reside there permanently. temporarily or permanently.
However, either because this supposed quality of life has become less accessible to locals, or because greater ambition has been awakened in them, the inhabitants of Alicante who reside abroad have multiplied by three in just a decade and a half. , an increase proportionally greater than in any other of the most populated provinces.
Specifically, if in 2009 there were 22,912 Alicante natives living - officially - outside the borders of Spain, in 2024 there will be 60,075, according to data from the National Institute of Statistics. Men and women are divided almost 50% (there are barely 485 more men); and approximately 65% are of working age (between 16 and 65 years old), 20% are under 16 and 15% are over retirement age.
With this increase, which no other province matches in percentage - although several, such as Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia or Malaga, have easily doubled their "emigrants" - Alicante surpasses Bizkaia and León in absolute numbers, two of the 12 provinces that make up 15 years old had more neighbors than her abroad.
France is the country whose census registers the most people from Alicante (11,551), followed by Argentina (7,264). But there is a difference between the Alicante 'colonies' of both territories: a third of the residents in Argentina are over 65 years old, while in France they are only 20%, as are minors, while 60% are in working age.
More than half of the total (33,148) live in Europe, with the United Kingdom (5,517), Germany (5,230) and Switzerland (4,759) as the most prominent destinations after the neighboring country. There are 20,411 Alicante residents registered in America, with the United States (3,283), Ecuador (2,103), Colombia (1,421) and Mexico (1,071) following the cradle of tango in the ranking.
The 937 Alicante natives who officially reside in Asia are widely spread across the great continent, since only China (192) and the United Arab Emirates (158) exceed one hundred. Morocco brings together the largest Alicante colony in Africa, with almost half of the total (385 of the 795). And in distant Oceania, of the 378 born on Earth, 319 live in Australia and the rest in New Zealand.
