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Five minutes from the coast of Adeje (Tenerife), a row of white houses could appear in any luxury catalog. Dream homes in a privileged enclave of the Canary Islands that do not fit with an area that is in the poorest 7% of Spain.
The new rent map, street by street: do you live in a rich or poor neighborhood?
Tourist municipalities such as Adeje, Antigua (Fuerteventura) or Benidorm (Alicante), repeat year after year among the poorest areas in national statistics, despite the fact that luxury homes -which reach 4,500 euros per square meter- and the bustle of restaurants with terraces on the beach and bars that charge 25 euros for a drink, would suggest otherwise.
But these data on average income levels in the region seem to be a mirage: in these same municipalities more than a third of the registered population does not file a tax return, according to the analysis carried out by elDiario.es based on population data from the National Statistics Institute (INE) and the Tax Agency.
Thus, the income figures do not reflect the reality of these areas. In order to understand this distortion, we have compared the number of income tax return holders submitted to the Tax Agency in 2024 (the income corresponds to 2023), with the census population as of January 1, 2024, as reported by the INE. The percentage of people who do not declare compared to the adults registered in each municipality varies between 5% and 50% in the highest cases.
Each bubble in the following map shows a municipality of more than 10,000 inhabitants, where yellow represents the areas with the highest percentage of people who would not be declaring out of the total number of registered adults. As you can see, the largest areas of under-declaration are in the Canary Islands, the Andalusian coast and the Mediterranean with towns such as Benidorm, Marbella (Malaga) or Adeje. These are eminently tourist areas where residents who are not declaring in Spain can represent half of the population, as is the case of Antigua or Fuengirola (Malaga).
The National Institute of Statistics itself already discovered this phenomenon during the process of creating the Atlas of Income Distribution, a statistic with detailed information on household income from...