Population Explosion! (and an update on my Spanish Nationality)

Last Monday my lawyer messaged me.

“I thought you should see this…” he said.

I opened the PDF file he’d sent along, and my heart fluttered a bit as I skimmed the four pages of dense legal Spanish. Just to confirm, I texted him back. Did this mean what I thought?

It did.

They’d accepted my appeal, and I’d been granted Spanish nationality.

Finally! After over 20 years living in Spain.

My wife Morena happened to be walking in the door at that point. I told her the news. We both cried. It was quite a moment. The end of my immigrant journey, sort of.

Soon, I’ll be just another Spaniard.

The Making of a Spaniard

I left my last article about Spanish nationality on a bit of a cliffhanger.

They rejected me. The end.

Their official reason for rejecting me was so stupid I didn’t even want to write about it at the time: they claimed I hadn’t proven that I speak Spanish, and thus wasn’t integrated into Spanish culture well enough to be a citizen.

Of course my lawyer had included my DELE Superior Spanish diploma in the papers we’d submitted.

It was there, right next to my criminal background check, my birth certificate, and the CCSE (the “citizenship test” of constitutional and sociocultural knowledge) that I had also passed.

But somehow, the bureaucrats hadn’t seen the diploma, and (instead of doing the legal thing and asking me to come back to present it) they’d just rejected my application.

We appealed, and waited, and waited, and finally they said yes.

So that’s mostly done. On Tuesday I went to a notary to swear my loyalty to King and Constitution. I renounced (in theory) my US citizenship… but that, of course, is just a formality.

And now I wait for the Registro Civil to make me a Spanish birth certificate. With that, I can go to the police for a DNI (the national identity card) and a Spanish passport.

This has all been a long time coming. And I can’t believe the moment is finally here. Almost.

The Spanish Population Explosion

In related news, Spain’s population is booming.

La Vanguardia reports this week that the population is now 49.3 million.

That’s the largest it’s ever been, and the graph they publish shows the number rising from 43 million in 2005 to the current figure – population growth of 6 million in just 20 years.

And it’s not that the Spanish are having more babies. A lot of that population is foreign born. There are (according to the same article) 650,000 new foreigners who have moved to Spain in just the last year.

The top three immigrant groups around Spain are Colombians, Moroccans and Venezuelans, which isn’t a big surprise, or a change from past years.

And the population growth is being felt all over: the number of residents has increased in every Comunidad Autónoma, as well as the city of Ceuta. Only Melilla has a lower population than it did a year ago.

(Spain has 17 Comunidades Autónomas, which are further divided into 50 provinces. There are also two “autonomous cities” on the north coast of Africa – the aforementioned Ceuta and Melilla. Remember that for when it’s time for you to take the citizenship test.)

So the population growth is huge, and it’s mostly because of immigration.

Immigration and Spanish Demographics

I moved to Spain in 2004, with no idea that I was part of a demographic.

But that was one of the peak years for Spanish immigration. At that point, down in Madrid, it seemed like half the people I met were Ecuadorean or Peruvian. A lot of people were coming to get jobs in construction or otherwise work on the housing boom. I became an English teacher.

Soon after, the bubble burst.

During the Great Recession, the population actually shrank a bit – Spaniards left to find work elsewhere, and immigrants were given lump-sum unemployment payments if they would just go home.

Language teachers did fine through the whole thing, because a lot of people were unemployed, and had little to do besides learn English (or German) and contemplate whether they should leave the country.

After the crisis, immigration picked up again, flattening out briefly for the Covid panic, before hitting its current upward trend in early 2022.

Now, the population is over 49 million, but that comes with some caveats: around 14 percent are “foreign” and 20% were born in other countries. The discrepancy is that a lot of people born in other countries have become Spanish in the meantime.

So the population of Spaniards can grow even if the number of traditional, multigenerational Spaniards shrinks.

That article in La Vanguardia actually says that the number of official Spaniards increased by almost 25,000 in the second quarter of 2025, largely due to people (like me) being granted Spanish nationality.

Dual Citizen Lifestyles

In case you’re wondering, I have a whole article about the renunciation of US citizenship part of this story.

The short version is this: Spain doesn’t officially recognize dual citizenship with the US (only with former Spanish colonies) so you have to renounce your other nationality when you “become Spanish”.

That’s what I did when I swore loyalty to Spain.

But there’s nothing legally binding about it, and you can keep your US passport.

In order to actually give up US citizenship, you have to do a longer process with the Consulate, and pay them a lot of money. It’s by no means obligatory that you do so upon acquiring another passport, and you don’t “lose” your citizenship just by saying something to a Spanish notary.

Obviously, talk to a lawyer, and don’t base your whole life on rumors you heard from some guy at a pub quiz – or, for that matter, on a blog.

Now, in theory, I’ll be entering the US on my American passport, and entering Spain with the Spanish one. And there are some rights that Spanish citizens have that will be new to me. For example, the right to vote for your choice of corrupt and incompetent politicians, in local and national elections.

In any case, the idea of my own Spanishness seems a bit silly to me – not least because I look so un-Spanish that even if I live to be 80, I don’t expect anyone to confuse me with one of “the locals”.

Still, I’m happy about the whole thing.

My journey out of illegality was not easy. I wrote about immigrant life several weeks ago – there were some tough times, and for many years I had no good reason to believe that things would go well for me.

The positive thing about all that is that Spain offers a clear “path to citizenship” and – at least in my case – walking that path has made me feel more committed to Spain than I would be otherwise.

What is Spanishness, anyway?

What does it mean to be Spanish?

In Western countries, in the 21st century, nationalist feeling is mostly discouraged.

“Loving your country” seems sort of cringe. And, as I explored in my article about symbols of Spain, a lot of people these days want nothing to do with traditional Spanish culture.

In the US, we sometimes say “baseball and apple pie” to talk about traditional Americana. Here in Spain, the equivalent would be “bullfights and paella”, or maybe, “Catholicism and sangría”.

“Flamenco and jamón”. I don’t know. It’s not quite the same.

But the current version of Spain began with the Christian Reconquest of territories that had been ruled for centuries by Muslims – Christianity was the bedrock of Spanish identity for a very long time.

Later, the dictator Francisco Franco instituted what he called National Catholicism as part of his ideology, and I get the impression that a lot of people got a bit sick of the whole thing at that point.

Your average Spanish person these days is not very religious, probably wouldn’t go to a bullfight, and doesn’t drink sangría. Flamenco is more regional than national. In other words, Spanish identity is complicated.

Nationalism and the Spanish Melting Pot

There’s also the issue of the various areas of Spain in which significant minorities would prefer to be their own country. Catalonia is one, and there’s also the Basque Country. And (to a lesser extent) Galicia.

Article 2 of the Constitution differentiates between the “indissoluble unity” of the Spanish Nation (with a capital N) and the lowercase-n nationalities and regions that make it up. And Wikipedia’s article on Spanish nationalism seems to suggest that you’re a Spanish nationalist if you believe in the indissoluble unity of Spain at all.

(Actually, “nationalism” is a word used mostly by the independence groups. I hear about Catalan nationalism a lot more than I hear about Spanish nationalism.)

Up until around the year 2000, Spain wasn’t a melting pot like the US. It was more like a regional melting pot, made up of Castilians, Catalans, Extremeños, Andaluces, Basques, Gallegos, etc.

These days, though, we’ve got people from everywhere you can imagine. And the one certain thing is that Spanishness is going to look a lot different moving forward.

So now you’re Spanish…

A conversation I have a couple times a month goes like this:

Someone asks where I’m from. I say I’m from the US but I’ve been here for many years.

And they reply, “Oh, so you’re Spanish now!”

I’m pretty sure they mean Spanish in my way of being. Nobody cares about what type of ID document you’re carrying around.

But I always say, “No, I’m fully American. I’ve just lived here a long time.”

Now, I guess I’m going to have to update that response to account for my new legal situation.

I don’t expect to start “feeling Spanish” as soon as I get the passport – and whatever it even means to “feel Spanish”. On the other hand, when I got my residence permit after several years of illegality, it changed my personality.

(I got a lot cockier, because I could just walk around like I was supposed to be here. Like I had every right to loiter on the streetcorner. I didn’t feel like I needed to keep my head down anymore. It was a magical feeling.)

So in a few months, I may be writing about what being Spanish feels like.

Or maybe I’ll be slicing ham, or learning to dance flamenco, or eating paella at the beach.

Either way, I’ll let you know.

¡Viva España!

Daniel AKA Mr Chorizo.

P.S. I’ve written quite a bit about my love for Spain over the years, but I’ve also considered that expat life might be overrated – especially if you’re getting your “information” from Instagram reels. And I even talked about a few things I hate about Spain. Because if you live in a place long enough, you’re bound to have all sorts of conflicting feelings about it. Anyway, what’s your definition of Spanishness? Let me know, right here… Thanks!

P.P.S. If you’re thinking about moving to Spain, or otherwise need help with your legal situation, talk to my lawyer Roberto at Melcart Abogados. (Tell him I sent you and I might get some sort of commission.) You can also get your immigration documents (translated and apostilled) from the US by using Continentalis.eu – I used them for my background check and birth certificate. (Use promo code DANIEL over there for a discount on their services. Highly recommended.)