Edmundo González Urrutia, an opposition candidate in the Venezuelan elections last July, recently arrived in Madrid and has joined the more than half a million of his compatriots living in Spain. The number of Venezuelans living in this country has tripled since 2016 and has gone from being 0.4% of the total population to around 1.1%.
The presence of Venezuelans has been growing since 2016. It did so at an almost constant rate of 80,000 people per year, with the only parenthesis being the pandemic, until it became the fourth foreign community in Spain, only behind Moroccans, Colombians and Romanians.
José Maldonado is one of them. A 46-year-old Venezuelan, he came to Spain seven years ago to try to help his sick parents who could not access the medicines they needed in any way. He started out as a delivery man for a fast food chain and now runs his own restaurant in Ciudad Lineal. “Most of our clients are Venezuelan, there are many in this area,” he says.
The latest data from the INE is from early 2023, but many more Venezuelans will have arrived since then. One of them is Carolina Guevara, 51, a teacher, who left her two children in Venezuela and arrived in Madrid at the beginning of the year. It was not the first time. When she was a child, she came to Spain on holiday. “I was always connected to this country,” she explains. It took her three months to find a job and now she works as a live-in intern.
They are two sides of an exodus of more than 7.7 million Venezuelans, the second largest in the world, according to the United Nations. There are 3 million in Colombia and 1.5 million in Peru, but Spain has become their main European destination.
What matters most is what happens closer to home. To make sure you don’t miss anything, subscribe.
KEEP READING
In which neighborhoods and cities are there more Venezuelans?
The following map, prepared using data from the 2023 census of the National Institute of Statistics (INE), shows the percentage of the population of each census section that are people born in Venezuela. There are municipalities and neighborhoods where they exceed 10%.
The presence of Venezuelans in important municipalities in the Canary Islands and Galicia is notable. In San Cristóbal de La Laguna and Santa Cruz de Tenerife they are almost 6% of the total population, and in Ourense and A Coruña they are over 3%. The presence of Venezuelans in these regions can perhaps be explained by the effect of the flow of emigrants leaving Spain in the 20th century. The connection predates the current Venezuelan exodus: in 2003, half of those born in Venezuela who lived in Spain were in the Canary Islands or Galicia.
This is the case of Beatriz García, a 61-year-old Venezuelan and daughter of Canarian parents, which allows her to have dual nationality. This architect arrived seven years ago with the aim of getting a job similar to the one she had in her country, but now she takes care of children. Beatriz is one of the almost 100,000 Venezuelans who live in Madrid, where they are 3% of the population. Their presence in the capital is 13 times greater than in 2003.
A more transversal migration in income
A distinctive element of the Venezuelan flow is that arrivals occur in neighborhoods of all incomes.
In Madrid, for example, they make up 3.4% of the population in low- or lower-middle-income neighbourhoods, but also 2% in the wealthiest areas. This sets them apart from other immigrants, such as Colombians or Moroccans, who are more numerous in modest neighbourhoods, but also from European foreigners, such as French or English, who are usually found in high-income areas.
This transversality, with some variations, is also observed in other cities such as Barcelona, Valencia or Santa Cruz de Tenerife.
Joseph Abdou, 42, is one of the Venezuelans who lives in one of the capital’s most affluent neighbourhoods. He arrived in Spain in 2017, he says: “The worst moment of the crisis that Venezuela has experienced in the last 20 years.” He landed alone in Madrid in search of some cousins who already lived there and now lives with his entire family in the Salamanca neighbourhood.
But it is also easy to find compatriots in lower-income districts, such as Carlos Castillo, 25, or Tony Ibarra, 30, both residents of Vallecas, who have been in this country for less than two years. Tony works as a cook in a restaurant in the centre. “Here where I work, there are eight Venezuelans and only one Spaniard.” In his free time, he is also an Uber delivery driver like Carlos.
Lorena Sánchez, who has just arrived in Madrid and has requested asylum, lives in the Quintana neighbourhood. Many of the migrants who arrive are beginning this process. Between 2017 and 2023 alone, more than 200,000 asylum applications from Venezuelan citizens were registered in Spain. “For my first appointment, I went to Pamplona,” says Lorena, who is continuing the process while waiting to have a permanent address where she can register, while she looks for work.
Some of the testimonies agree on the difficulty of arriving. Beatriz, who had a job and a stable life in her country, was unemployed for a year and a half and used up her savings. When she started taking care of children, it was not easy either: “I have suffered to be here. It has been an uphill struggle. There were people who treated me very badly,” she remembers. Despite everything, she does not think about returning: “I have never returned nor do I plan to return. I no longer see it as my country. It hurts me too much, I will not return even if the government falls.”
#Venezuelans #living #Spain #tripled #years #Find #neighborhoods #live