Births in the Canary Islands, at historical lows: only 5,732 in six months
Archive photo of a newborn baby in a Canarian hospital. /
birth rate
The fall between January and June is 3.84% compared to the same period in 2021 and 25% in the last six years. The decline is more pronounced in the western province
Births in the Canary Islands continue to mark historical lows. The archipelago is the third autonomous community with the largest drop in the first half of this year compared to the same period in 2021, 3.84%.
The decline is much more pronounced in the province of Santa Cruz de Tenerifewith 6.97%, by 1.10% in the province of Las Palmas, according to data published this Wednesday by the National Institute of Statistics (INE).
Between January and June, 5,732 boys and girls were born in the archipelago -3,138 in Las Palmas and 2,594 in the western province-, compared to 5,961 in the first half of 2021. Compared to 2019, the drop is 14.86%. That year there were 6,732 births on the islands in the first semester, but the decline in the birth rate has been constant in recent decades.
Only in six years the drop in births between January and June is 25%: 2,231 more babies were born in 2016 than in 2022.
If the Canarian population increases, it is due to the arrival of foreigners, since the natural growth of the population -the difference between people born and deceased- has also shown a negative balance for years, and in 2022 that difference may become more acute because the fall in births It is joined by an increase in deaths.
In these first six months of the year (specifically until July 4), according to the INE estimate, 9,886 people have died on the islands for the 5,732 born. There are 4,154 more deaths.
The trend in the drop in births is the same in the country as a whole. Between January and June there were 159,705 births in Spain, a figure at a minimum since the end of the 1990s which, however, is slightly higher, 0.13%, than that of the first half of 2021, when the children conceived were born in the first phase of the pandemic, according to Efe.
The data published by the INE say that the 159,705 boys and girls born in Spain between January and June of this year are 211 more than the 159,494 in the same period of 2021 (the provisional figure published a year ago was 160,681, somewhat higher than the definitive released yesterday). Instead, they represent 10,590 less than in the first half of 2020 and around 40,000 less than those registered just six years ago, in 2016.
The number of births increased in this first semester in six autonomous communities: Aturias, Madrid, Ceuta, Comunidad Valenciana, Cataluña, Cantabria and Castilla y León. Where they fell the most was in La Rioja, 8.02%, ahead of the two archipelagos: 4.04% in the Balearic Islands and 3.84% in the Canary Islands.
58% of mothers in their thirties
Of the 5,732 births registered in the Canary Islands in the first half of this year, in 3,319 the mothers were between 30 and 39 years old, 57.9%, with 1,776 between 30 and 34 and 1,543 between 35 and 39 years old, according to data from the INE released this Wednesday. In their twenties there are 1,703 women who have given birth between January and June in the Canary Islands (29.7%), 1,169 between 25 and 29 years old and 534 between 20 and 24. In the forties, 625 women have been mothers (10.9%) , 552 between 40 and 44 and 73 between 45 and 49. There were also 80 teenage mothers this first semester, 79 between 15 and 19 and one under 15 years old. With more than 50 they have had five women.
