Areas with most sunshine hours registered Spain 2017

Spain is a major European holiday destination. Besides its cultural and architectural appeal, the Mediterranean country draws in millions of tourists in search of the warm Spanish sun. This sunshine stays mainly in southern, coastal and insular areas of Spain, with Huelva topping the list of sunniest Spanish cities at over 3.5 thousand sunshine hours in 2017. Major coastal holiday destinations, such as Malaga, Almeria, Alicante or Tenerife also made the list, all of them with over three thousand hours of sunshine in 2017. In contrast, Bilbao ranked as the Spanish area with the lowest number of sunshine hours that year.

August: the driest and hottest month in Spain

Most of that sunshine is concentrated in August, which also ranked as the hottest month in Spain in 2018. The Spanish mean temperature for the said month averaged out at 25.6 degrees, while the coldest month that year was February, with an average of 6.9 degrees Celsius. In 2017, the rainiest month was November, when over 111 millimeters of precipitation were registered on average in Spain. The driest month was again August, which recorded only an average of 18.2 millimeters of precipitation that year.

Tourism constitutes an essential industry for the Spanish economic system

Travel and tourism have become one of the leading engines of growth for the Spanish economy, featuring an ongoing increase in the GDP contribution over the last years and projected to reach approximately 178 billion euros in 2018. Spain ranked second on the World Tourism Organization’s list of most visited countries in the world, with its number of international visitors amounting to nearly 82 million in 2017. The Mediterranean country is also one of Europe’s favorite holiday destinations in 2018 – the United Kingdom, Germany and France appeared in the leading positions of the largest number of international visitors to Spain by country of residence, as confirms the latest studies.