International growth is changing the local economy

Torrevieja is no longer simply a Spanish coastal town with a large expatriate community. Its demographic structure has reached the point where international residents form the majority of the registered population — and that change is increasingly visible in the city’s shops, restaurants, building companies, property services and professional businesses.

At the beginning of 2026, Torrevieja had 110,500 registered residents, according to the municipal population register. Of these, 59,205 were of international origin, equivalent to approximately 53.6% of the population. Just one year earlier, the international population stood at 55,390. In other words, Torrevieja added 3,815 international residents in a single year, compared with only 335 additional Spanish residents. International residents therefore accounted for roughly 92% of the city’s total population increase between the beginning of 2025 and 2026.

The growth is exceptional even by Spanish standards. Spain’s National Statistics Institute, INE, calculated that Torrevieja’s resident population grew by 4.65% during 2025, the highest percentage among the principal Spanish municipalities included in its comparison.

That expanding international population is creating a larger year-round market for businesses that can provide food, building and renovation work, property-related services, accounting and professional advice, digital services, tourism products and retail.

But there is an important distinction to make: population growth does not automatically tell us how many foreign-owned businesses have opened.

What the official business figures really show

There is no publicly available official statistical series that provides, in one dataset, the number of newly created businesses in Torrevieja broken down simultaneously by municipality, sector and nationality of the owner. INE’s official statistics on newly incorporated companies are published at provincial and autonomous-community level, rather than providing this complete municipal breakdown.

That means it would be misleading to claim, for example, that exactly 200 Ukrainian restaurants or 300 British building firms have opened in Torrevieja unless individual company records were researched one by one.

The strongest comparable evidence therefore comes from Spain’s RETA self-employed system, which captures people working for themselves, together with regional data for the Valencian Community. And those figures reveal a remarkable change.

Between March 2021 and March 2025, Spain gained a net 108,155 self-employed workers. Of that increase, 104,338 were foreign nationals. In other words, foreign entrepreneurs represented 96.5% of Spain’s net increase in self-employment during the four-year period, according to an analysis by the Spanish Federation of Self-Employed Workers, ATA.

The trend was particularly strong in the Comunitat Valenciana. During the same period, the region added 22,391 foreign self-employed workers, compared with just 2,134 Spanish self-employed workers. Calculated from those figures, foreign nationals represented more than 91% of the region’s net increase in self-employment.

These are net increases, not the gross number of businesses opened: some businesses will have started while others closed. Nevertheless, they provide strong evidence of who is driving the expansion of self-employment.

Construction, professional services and hospitality lead the growth

The biggest increase among foreign self-employed workers in Spain between March 2021 and March 2025 occurred in construction, which added a net 17,446 foreign autónomos. This category includes much of the building economy that is particularly relevant to the Costa Blanca: construction, renovation and many building-related trades.

For Torrevieja, that development is significant. A rapidly growing population, a very large stock of second homes and tourist accommodation, and continuous turnover among international property owners all create demand for renovation, maintenance and related household services. The national figures should not be presented as Torrevieja-specific numbers, but they fit closely with the type of service economy generated by an international residential destination such as Torrevieja. The municipality’s own tourism strategy describes holiday rentals and residential tourism as increasingly important parts of the local economy.

The second-largest increase was in professional, scientific and technical activities, with 13,906 additional foreign self-employed workers. This broad category can include consultants, architects, technical specialists, designers, accountants and other professional services.

Hospitality came close behind, adding 12,670 foreign autónomos, while information and communication increased by 11,115. Foreign entrepreneurs also recorded a net increase of 7,955 in trade and retail, despite the number of Spanish self-employed workers in that sector falling by more than 50,000 during the same period.

Taken together, the figures show that the international entrepreneur is no longer concentrated only in the traditional expat bar, estate agency or small shop. Foreign self-employment is expanding into construction, skilled and professional services, technology and communications as well as hospitality and commerce.

Restaurants, tourism and property services have an unusually large local market

Hospitality deserves special attention in Torrevieja because the city already has an unusually extensive restaurant sector.

Torrevieja’s official Strategic Tourism Plan 2025–2029 records 588 restaurants with capacity for 29,626 diners. The same municipal document describes the restaurant offer as broad and sees further potential in differentiated gastronomy, local products and food-related tourism.

Accommodation tells an equally interesting story. The municipality recorded 6,309 registered tourist apartments or tourist-use homes, representing 41,463 beds in 2024. They accounted for approximately 94% of the city’s regulated accommodation capacity. By comparison, Torrevieja had only 13 hotels with 1,778 beds. The city also had 20 travel agencies and 19 active-tourism companies.

The tourism plan specifically describes a significant expansion of tourist-use housing and notes the continuing importance of the Nordic market to residential tourism.

This helps explain why several interconnected business areas have favourable conditions in Torrevieja: restaurants and cafés, property management, cleaning and maintenance, construction and renovation, holiday-rental services, travel and leisure businesses, and professional services aimed at international property owners.

It is therefore more accurate to describe these as areas supported by Torrevieja’s demographic and tourism growth rather than to invent municipal start-up figures that official statistics do not provide.

Where are Torrevieja’s international residents coming from?

The nationality figures also reveal how much the customer base — and potentially the entrepreneurial base — has changed.

At the beginning of 2026, Ukrainians were Torrevieja’s largest foreign nationality, with 10,074 registered residents. Russians numbered 5,746, Colombians 5,550 and British residents 4,643. Morocco had grown particularly strongly, from 2,961 registered residents at the beginning of 2025 to 3,525 a year later.

Torrevieja also had sizeable communities from Sweden, Romania, Belgium, Italy, Germany and Poland. Swedish residents numbered 1,921, followed by Romanians at 1,767, Belgians at 1,637, Italians at 1,390, Germans at 1,313 and Poles at 1,320. Altogether, people from 123 countries were registered in the municipality.

Latin America is another increasingly important part of the picture. Colombia is now the third-largest foreign nationality in Torrevieja, while the municipal register also shows growing communities from Brazil, Venezuela and Argentina.

However, these population figures must not be interpreted as a ranking of business owners. The available municipal data tells us where residents come from; it does not tell us which nationality opened the greatest number of restaurants, construction firms or consultancies.

What the figures do demonstrate is that Torrevieja’s commercial market has become extraordinarily multilingual and international.

A structural change rather than a temporary boom

The most important conclusion is not that one particular foreign nationality or one particular sector has suddenly taken over Torrevieja’s economy. The deeper change is that international residents are increasingly becoming producers and service providers as well as consumers.

Across Spain, foreign nationals generated 96.5% of the net increase in self-employment from 2021 to 2025. In the Comunitat Valenciana, foreign autónomos increased by 22,391, compared with only 2,134 additional Spanish autónomos. Construction, professional services, hospitality, information and communication, and trade were among the clearest areas of foreign entrepreneurial growth.

Torrevieja, meanwhile, has demographic conditions that amplify precisely those sectors: an international majority population, Spain-leading population growth, 588 restaurants, more than 41,000 registered tourist-accommodation places in apartments and tourist homes, and a residential-tourism market heavily connected to northern and other European countries.

The safest conclusion from the available evidence is therefore also the most interesting one: foreign entrepreneurship is no longer a niche element of Torrevieja’s economy. It is becoming part of the structure on which the city’s continued growth depends.

For restaurants, builders and renovation specialists, property and tourism services, professional consultants, technology businesses and retailers, Torrevieja’s increasingly international population is creating both a larger customer base and a new generation of entrepreneurs. The exact number of foreign-owned companies opened within the municipality cannot honestly be extracted from the current official datasets — but the demographic, regional self-employment and local tourism figures all point in the same direction.