Laurence Dollimore
ANDALUCIA has seen a 10% rise in foreign tourists in the first ten months of this year compared to the same period in 2016.
Some 10,451,449 extranjeros visited the holiday hotspot between January and October, according to the National Institute of Statistics (INE).
In October alone, a huge 1,122,329 international tourists visited the region, 2.6% more than last year.
Andalucia is now the fourth most popular destination, behind Catalunya, the Balearic Islands and the Canary Islands.
British tourists topped the list of visitors, accounting for 26.5% of the total.
On a national level, Spain received more than 73.4 million foreign tourists in the first 10 months of the year, an increase of 9.2%.
In October, 7.3 million international tourists visited the country, 1.8% more than in the same month of the previous year.
The number of Brits coming to Spain increased by 7.1% to more than 17 million Brits, almost one third of the whole population.
It was followed by Germany, which experienced a growth of 5.9%, to 10.8 million visitors, and France, with more than 10.1 million international tourists, representing an increase of 0.4%.
Catalonia was the autonomous community that received the most international tourists last October, with 1.5 million visitors, despite suffering a fall of 4.7% in the arrival of foreign tourists during the tenth month of the year, thanks to the referendum and ensuing political crisis.
