Éxodo / Exodus: The urban exodus from Spain, the new depopulation of the 21st century by El Confidencial

Unlike migrations within the same region, motivated mainly by access to housing, in interprovincial movements the search for better job opportunities plays a very important role. An analysis carried out by El Confidencial of the microdata of the statistics of residential variations of the National Institute of Statistics (INE) shows that the rural exodus of the second half of the 20th century is already history. Now, in the 21st century, we are experiencing a second exodus: the urban exodus.
Territorial mobility within Spain has increased considerably, from some 300,000 interprovincial migrations each year to more than 600,000 during the 21st century.
The eight people who have produced this series of reports are a good example of the urban exodus. Thirty-somethings (or almost) with university education, six of us arrived in Madrid from other provincial cities, such as Zaragoza, Malaga, Granada, Talavera de la Reina, Gijón or Campoo (Cantabria), while only two were born in Madrid.
After categorizing those movements that have involved a change of province in the period 1988-2018, we have analyzed patterns of interprovincial mobility from 15.2 million migrations in these 31 years, regardless of the migrant's sex, age or place of birth.
To make the graphs and maps, we have illustrated all the flows with origin or destination to the provinces of Madrid and Barcelona, plus those that have moved more than 10,000 people in the period 1988-2018. The project team was multidisciplinary, and was led by the journalist Javier Jorrín, María Zuil and the visuals journalists, data journalists and programmers Javier Escudero, Laura Martín, Pablo López Learte, Luis Rodríguez, Pablo Narváez and Antonio Hernández.