Spain

Spain enters the second quarter of the twenty-first century at an extraordinary peak in its tourism cycle. In 2024 the country received roughly 94 million international visitors, a ten-percent jump over the previous year, and earned around 126 billion euros in international tourism receipts. Tourism now accounts for somewhere between twelve and thirteen percent of Spanish GDP depending on how the contribution is measured, and supports close to three million jobs. Spain is the world's second-most-visited country and ranks among the top three by tourism revenue. Yet this success rests on a Mediterranean coastal product whose climatic foundations are already being eroded, and on a public consent that began to fracture decisively in 2024. The next seventy-five years will not erase Spanish tourism. They will, however, almost certainly reshape it beyond easy recognition.

The Mediterranean basin sits among the most climate-sensitive regions on Earth, alongside the Arctic and small island states. Surface temperatures across the basin are already about a degree and a half above pre-industrial levels, roughly half a degree ahead of the global average, and future warming is projected to outpace the global mean by about a fifth annually and by half in summer. For Spain, which makes up nearly a third of the basin's land area, this translates into a summer climate that is heating materially faster than the global headline figure communicated to the public. Under a central-case emissions trajectory, annual maximum temperatures across the Iberian interior are projected to rise by two to four degrees by the end of the century, and under a high-emissions pathway by four to seven degrees. Heatwave frequency has already doubled since the turn of the millennium. The structure of summer in Andalusia, Extremadura and the Guadalquivir basin is on track to render July and August unfavourable for outdoor leisure by late century, even as May, June, September and October become excellent climate windows for the same coasts. The tourism season, in other words, is moving rather than shrinking. The problem is that the infrastructure — resorts, transport schedules, school calendars — is overwhelmingly built around the season that is leaving.

The water story is, if anything, more immediate. Roughly three quarters of Spanish territory is classified as susceptible to desertification, and around a fifth already exhibits semi-arid or arid characteristics. Active land degradation tripled in the decade to 2024. Tourism is one of three claimants competing for a shrinking water budget alongside agriculture, which still uses the bulk of Spanish freshwater, and urban supply. The Tajo–Segura aqueduct, which has fed the irrigated agriculture and golf-tourism economy of the southeast since 1979, faces escalating legal and political stress. Spain's desalination fleet, already the largest in Europe, will need to expand substantially, but desalination is itself energy-intensive in ways that interact uncomfortably with another new water claimant: the artificial-intelligence data-centre buildout.

Along the coast, sea-level rise and marine heatwaves are reshaping the product itself. Mediterranean sea level rose at nearly three millimetres per year between 1993 and 2018, accelerating from a slower twentieth-century baseline, and is projected to rise between roughly half a metre and a metre by 2100 depending on emissions. For Spain, this means significant beach retreat along the Costa Brava, the Maresme, the Costa Daurada, the Costa del Sol, parts of Doñana's Atlantic frontage, and most acutely the Ebro Delta and the sandbar around the Mar Menor. Marine heatwaves have already triggered unprecedented stress responses in Posidonia oceanica meadows, the endemic Mediterranean seagrass that both replenishes beach sand and attenuates coastal storms. Their progressive loss will accelerate erosion at precisely the moment rising seas are doing the same.

The Pyrenees and Sierra Nevada warm faster than the Spanish mean and are among Europe's most snow-sensitive ranges. The natural snow-reliability elevation is expected to climb several hundred metres in the coming decades. Under a high-emissions trajectory, no Spanish Pyrenean or Sierra Nevada resort is likely to remain reliably viable on natural snow by the end of the century. Snowmaking can buy time but is itself water- and energy-hungry. The most plausible long-term outcome is that a small handful of high-altitude Pyrenean stations survive on heavy artificial-snow regimes, while Sierra Nevada transitions fully into a summer mountain destination — trail running, astronomy at the high-altitude observatory, four-season highland hospitality.

Against this climatic backdrop, the political moment of 2024 was not a passing irritation but the leading edge of a structural rebalancing. In April that year tens of thousands marched across all seven Canary Islands under the slogan Canarias tiene un límite — the Canaries have a limit. The archipelago had received roughly seven tourists for every resident the year before, while more than a third of Canarians remained at risk of poverty or social exclusion. In July, demonstrators in Barcelona sprayed visitors with water pistols along Las Ramblas in an image that travelled globally; the city's mayor announced that the more than ten thousand short-term-rental licences in operation would not be renewed when they expire in late 2028, a measure subsequently upheld by Spain's Constitutional Court. Mallorca and Ibiza hosted protests of comparable scale. A coordinated second wave in May 2025 spread the protests beyond Spain's borders. Governments responded with a patchwork of tourist taxes, cruise-call caps, rental moratoria and regional capacity frameworks. None of these measures, taken individually, has yet bent the arrivals curve. Collectively they have begun to assemble an unusually complete policy toolkit, and they signal that water, housing and ecosystem limits — not demand — will set the binding constraint on Spanish tourism for the rest of the century.

The geography of Spanish tourism is therefore poised to rotate. The classic sol y playa coastal product south of Valencia will most likely contract in its August peak and extend into longer shoulder seasons, with winter-sun tourism on the Costa del Sol emerging as a new structural product. Andalusia's cultural circuit through Seville, Córdoba and Granada will probably invert its dominant season toward October-to-April. The Canaries, sheltered by trade-wind cooling and a sub-Iberian latitude, are likely the major relative winner among Spain's traditional regions, though only if political consent is preserved through redistribution and capping. The northern coasts — Galicia, Asturias, Cantabria, the Basque Country — together with the highland interior of Castilla y León, Extremadura, Aragón and the inland wine regions, form the most credible climate-refuge cluster in Mediterranean Europe, provided wildfire risk is actively managed. The 2022 fire season, which burned roughly 300,000 hectares and devastated parts of Galicia and Castilla y León, was a sharp warning that rural depopulation, eucalyptus monoculture and warmer drier summers are converting formerly wet landscapes into fire-prone ones.

The Camino de Santiago is perhaps the most quietly resilient of Spain's tourism products. Its dispersed, slow, low-carbon, weather-tolerant character allows it to absorb growth without local-resident backlash, and its Atlantic and Asturian variants will likely take share from the increasingly hot Camino Francés. Wine tourism looks similarly robust through the century, even as the wine itself changes: producers in Rioja are moving plantings up the slopes of Monte Yerga, Penedès and Bierzo and the Sierra de Gredos are seeing renewed interest at altitude, and varietal flexibility and indigenous-grape rescue programmes are rewriting what Spanish wine will taste like in 2050. The Alhambra, already operating strict visitor caps, will be increasingly mediated by dynamic pricing and digital-twin crowd-flow management. Heritage maintenance itself is being transformed by parametric modelling and computer-controlled stone-cutting, with implications for predictive conservation across Spain's fifty UNESCO sites.

Two flagship ecosystems test the credibility of Spain's nature-tourism proposition. The Doñana wetlands, a World Heritage site since 1994, have seen their main lagoon and most of their freshwater pools dry completely in recent summers, with cascading damage to amphibians, freshwater turtles and cork oaks. The UNESCO World Heritage Committee has demanded an updated conservation report and threatened to add Doñana to the In Danger list, an outcome that would be internationally embarrassing. The Mar Menor, Europe's largest saltwater lagoon, has suffered three catastrophic eutrophication-driven die-offs since 2016 and lost the great majority of its seagrass meadows; the Spanish parliament responded in 2022 by granting the lagoon legal personhood, Europe's first such recognition, though water authorities do not project recovery before 2039. These are not peripheral issues. They are the symbolic test cases of whether Spain can credibly continue to market itself as a nature destination.

Artificial intelligence enters this picture as a powerful accelerant of whichever trajectory policy chooses. On the constructive side, digital twins of high-pressure heritage sites, machine-learning leak detection in water utilities, satellite-and-ML wildfire prediction, predictive heritage maintenance, AI-mediated multilingual interpretation, and mandatory carbon-disclosure tooling can compress the adaptation timeline by years. On the destructive side, generative-AI data-centre water and electricity intensity is several times that of traditional cloud workloads, and Spain's booming data-centre cluster — concentrated in Madrid, Aragón and Catalonia — is on a trajectory to compete materially with tourism and agriculture for water by the early 2030s. Algorithmic pricing engines have been credibly linked to rental-market displacement; recommendation systems trained on engagement data tend to deepen rather than disperse concentration; surveillance creep at heritage sites tests the boundaries of the EU AI Act; the most automatable hospitality functions are concentrated precisely in the workforce that has fewest alternatives. The decisive variable is governance. If Spain treats AI as a regulated public utility within destination management — using it for demand-shaping rather than supply-stimulation — the technology can support the transition. If it is treated as a laissez-faire growth engine, it will deepen exactly the pathologies that drove the 2024 protests.

Pulling these threads together yields a reasonably clear picture for 2100. Under the central trajectory implied by current global policy, Iberian summer warming reaches around three and a half to four and a half degrees, sea level rises by roughly half a metre to seventy centimetres, and southern Spanish precipitation declines by between a tenth and a fifth. Mediterranean July-and-August tourism is materially diminished; the shoulder seasons grow; the geographic distribution rotates north and inland; arrivals plateau at perhaps 100 to 115 million through 2050 and then most likely decline into the eighty-five to one-hundred-million range later in the century, as long-haul aviation faces carbon constraints and southern summer comfort deteriorates. Tourism's GDP share stabilises somewhere in the eleven-to-thirteen percent range — lower than today's peak, but still systemically important. Under a more optimistic mitigation trajectory, the transformation is gentler and the Mediterranean season is preserved in altered form. Under a high-emissions pathway, summer tourism south of Valencia partially collapses, Doñana is lost as a viable wetland, and the country undertakes managed retreat from significant stretches of coastline.

What seems most clear is that Spain in 2100 will still be a major tourism economy — most likely a top-five global destination — but a substantially different one. Less August beach and more April-to-June and September-to-November coast. Less Mediterranean and more Atlantic and Cantabrian. Less concentration in Barcelona and the Balearics and more dispersion through Galicia, Asturias, Castilla y León, Aragón and the highland wine regions. Fewer natural-snow ski days and more four-season mountain tourism. Fewer cruise-ship turnarounds and more high-speed-rail-based circuits. The Camino busier than it has been in centuries. Two structural facts override everything else. The Mediterranean is the world's leading climate-change hotspot, and Spain is its largest country. And the public consent for the existing tourism model began breaking in 2024 and is not going to reassemble. Every plausible 2100 outcome flows from how Spain responds to those two facts over the next decade. The decisions that determine which Spain shows up at the end of the century are being made now — in Barcelona's housing courts, in Doñana's irrigation registries, in Madrid's data-centre permits, in the autonomous communities' water plans, and in the European Union's AI Act enforcement.