Madrid (EFE) and Ecuadorians (10,845).
According to the Statistics on acquisitions of Spanish nationality of residents for the year 2022 published this Thursday by the INE, half (49.8%) occurred in Catalonia.
The majority of foreigners (157,415) obtained nationality by legal residence in Spain for at least 10 years, continuously and immediately prior to the petition.
The other 23,558 were cases of people whose father or mother was Spanish and had been born in Spain; This modality occurred above all in those under 20 years of age (95.7% of the total acquisitions were by option).
47% were men and 53% women; By age, people under 10 years of age constituted the largest group in terms of acquisitions of Spanish nationality, followed by the group from 30 to 39 years of age.
The 26% increase in acquisitions of Spanish nationality compared to the previous year was higher than that of 2021, which amounted to 14% compared to 2020.
The most frequent country of birth in acquisitions of Spanish nationality was Spain, with 55,079 cases. The majority were children (76.2% under 10 years of age).
Among those born outside of Spain, the most frequent country of birth was Morocco, with 23,335 acquisitions of nationality.
The most frequent nationality of origin among people who acquired Spanish nationality in 2022 was that of Morocco, with 55,463 cases; followed by nationalities from South American and Central American and Caribbean countries: Colombia (11,125), Ecuador (10,845), Bolivia (9,016), the Dominican Republic (8,100) and Venezuela (8,036). Among Asian countries, Pakistan stood out (6,400 people).
Catalonia and Madrid account for half
Catalonia (with 48,901 cases) and the Community of Madrid (with 41,456) accounted for 49.8% of the acquisitions of Spanish nationality in 2022.
For their part, Extremadura (760) and La Rioja (1,083) were the autonomous communities with the lowest number of acquisitions of nationality among their residents.
Comparing with the foreign resident population at the beginning of 2022, the greatest intensities of the phenomenon of acquisition of nationality occurred in the Region of Murcia (4.7% of foreigners acquired Spanish nationality), Comunidad de Madrid (4.5 %) and the Basque Country (4%).
On the contrary, the lowest percentages occurred in Extremadura (2.1%), the Canary Islands (2.2%) and Andalusia (2.2%).
According to the year of arrival in Spain, of the 181,581 people residing in Spain who in 2022 acquired Spanish nationality, 30.3% had always resided in Spain. The remaining 69.7% had previously resided abroad.
Since 2002, the most frequent year of arrival for people who acquired Spanish nationality in 2022 was 2007. That is, it took about 15 years to acquire Spanish nationality.