Alicante and Seville are the cities where the poorest neighbourhoods in Spain are located, while their provinces contain a good number of the lowest-income towns in the country.
This is indicated by data from the National Institute of Statistics (INE), which indicates how the lowest incomes in Spain, differentiated by neighbourhood, were located in the Seville neighbourhoods of Polígono Sur, Los Pajaritos and Amate, and in the Juan XXIII neighbourhood of Alicante.
In addition, other areas of Seville or Alicante appear on the list of the ten next poorest neighbourhoods in the country.
Along with this, in the list of the 20 municipalities with more than 20,000 inhabitants with the lowest income per inhabitant recently published by the INE for the year 2019, there are towns in Seville such as Los Palacios – Villafranca or Lebrija, and Alicante such as Torrevieja and Crevillente.
These data can be related to the fact that both provinces are among those that have received the least investment in infrastructure from the General State Budget (PGE) between 1985 and 2018, according to a list of the Independent Authority for Fiscal Responsibility (AIReF) that takes take into account the number of inhabitants for its calculation.
The data just published does not reflect how the trend could have changed, perhaps, with respect to the Seville capital at least, which has received investments in the 2023 budgets for the SE-40 ring road, the Centennial bridge and line 3 of the metro.
But that would not be the case with respect to Alicante : the Business Confederation of the Valencian Community, the Alicante Chamber of Commerce and the Institute of Economic Studies of the Province of Alicante pointed out in October that the latest budgets “do nothing” to this province, once again.
“If in the PGE 2021 298.78 million were assigned to Alicante, this figure dropped to 183.65 in 2022 and drops to 160.3 in those of 2023. On the contrary, Alicante is the second province in Spain in the one that has grown the population the most since 2020 and the fifth that contributes the most to the state GDP”, stated a document released in October 2022.
“Alicante has one of the lowest per capita incomes in Spain, it occupies position 44 out of 52”, added the document, which complained that “Alicantinos will receive less than 85.4 euro per inhabitant”.
“This investment places us in the last place of investments per inhabitant, far from the penultimate province, which is Jaén with 110 euro,” they complained.
The convergence between low investment and poor towns also occurs in Andalusian provinces such as Cádiz or Huelva, which are also among those that have received the least investment in infrastructure from the state budget between 1985 and 2018, according to AIReF and always in terms of real gross investment per inhabitant.
Cádiz and Huelva also contribute several towns to the INE’s list of the poorest towns, in which the province of Almería stands out above any other, which in the aforementioned AIReF ranking is among those that have received mediocre investment, but not among the worst treated.
