Where do people like me actually buy?

Foreign buyers accounted for around 13.8% of all Spanish property purchases in 2025, close to 97,300 homes. They're not spread evenly. The Costa Blanca province of Alicante is comfortably the leader, with foreign buyers making up over 40% of transactions, and a handful of provinces, including Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Málaga, the Balearics, Girona and Murcia, see foreign buyers take more than a fifth of all sales.

The nationalities are shifting too. British buyers, long the dominant group, have lost share over the years, and the international mix is broader than it used to be. In Alicante, for instance, recent figures put Dutch buyers ahead of Germans and Britons. The headline: this is a diverse, international market, not a single expat monoculture.

The logic isn't mysterious. The Costa Blanca and Costa del Sol pair reliable weather with airports that fly year-round and decades of infrastructure built around international residents. The islands offer the same in a more contained setting. These areas are popular because they remove friction, which is a perfectly good reason to choose one, and the reason resale tends to be easier there too.

Kal, a property developer from Tamworth, bought a three-bedroom apartment in Fuengirola on the Costa del Sol, one of those well-established Málaga-province towns where the international and the Spanish sit side by side. You can hear his experience on episode 15 of the Kyero Spanish Property Podcast.