News: Spain has highest number of apartment dwellers in the EU
According to a recent report from the European Commission statistics office, Eurostat, Spain comes first in the ranking of European Union countries where the largest part of the population lives in apartments, with around 66% of the Spanish population living in apartments compared to 33% who live in a house. When compared to other neighbouring countries, the situation is quite different. Such is the case of France, for instance, where seven out of ten of the inhabitants live in a house, while only three out of ten live in apartments.
The difference is even bigger when comparing Spain´s figures with those for the United Kingdom, where 85% of the population live in houses compared to 15% who live in apartments. In terms of the percentages of the population who live in apartments, the countries closest to Spain are Latvia (65%), Lithuania (58%) and Greece (56%).
The average percentage for the EU countries is also significantly different to Spain, with six out of ten Europeans living in a house, and four out of ten living in an apartment, which is more than 2.5 points less that the Spanish percentage.
Figures from the Eurostat study also confirm that Spain is still very much a nation of home owners, with nearly eight out of every ten Spaniards owning the property they live in, which is 8.5% more than the European average. In contrast, only some 20% of the Spanish live in rented housing compared with the EU average of 29%.