A constantly falling birth rate
With less than one child per woman (0.8), the Canary archipelago is at the bottom of the Spanish fertility league, according to a study published by the INE in 2023. In the space of just twenty years, the Canaries have gone from being a region with a relatively high birth rate, comparable to European figures, to a community with its worst data since statistics began in 1941.
According to specialists, this drop in the birth rate is largely due to low wages and high unemployment.
And the figures for deaths and life expectancy do not help to improve the picture. This trend began in 2018 and has continued ever since. With a negative balance between births and deaths amounting to almost 4,500 over the following years, reaching almost 6,000 in 2023. Moreover, life expectancy places the Canaries at the bottom of the Spanish league, only surpassed by the poor results of Melilla and Ceuta. In 2022, the Canaries had a maximum life expectancy of 81.8 years for those born in 2022, almost three years less than in the Community of Madrid and almost two for La Rioja, the two Spanish communities with the highest life expectancy. In analyzing this result, specialists point to its health situation, one of the worst in Spain, and its very high poverty rate. In 2023, the European indicator (Arope, person at risk of poverty or social exclusion) reached 33.8%, down on 2022 (36.2%) but up on the figure estimated by Caritas in 2019 (29%). However, one factor continues to drive the Canary Islands' population forward: immigration, which sometimes offsets the fall in the birth rate. This is the case, for example, in the south of the island of Tenerife, where the demographic outlook is brighter thanks to economic activity. The population that comes to work here is younger, therefore of child-bearing age, and often comes from populations that continue to have more children. Following the logic of this economic data, El Hierro is the "oldest" island, followed by La Palma and La Gomera. The "youngest" are the more prosperous Lanzarote and Fuerteventura.
Women and young people still in a precarious situation
While the presence of women on the labor market has generally increased in Spain in 2023, with an employment rate of 64.1% (compared with 53.1% in 2013 - Source: Eurostat), the country remains 2nd in Europe in terms of the size of the female unemployment rate, with a figure of 14.8%, but which rises to 18.6% for the Canaries (2022). On the political front, Pedro Sánchez's government has sent out a strong signal by including more women than men (11 versus 6). Unfortunately, at the same time, Spain has seen a large number of women murdered: 39 in mid-October 2018 and almost 1,000 since records began in 2003. That's why Women's Day on March 8, 2018 was marked by unprecedented demonstrations across Spain, attended by almost 30,000 people in the Canary Islands. For a day that was also intended to be the occasion of the first feminist strike. This anger manifested itself once again in April 2018, after the Pamplona court's decision to charge a young woman with abuse of weakness, rather than rape, was seen as lax, following the Sanfermines festival in Pamplona. In the Canary Islands, women also continue to demonstrate regularly when murders of women hit the headlines.
With regard to the situation of young people, a study published in 2018 by the Reina Sofia Center for Adolescents highlights a very worrying situation. Along with Castilla-La Mancha and Extremadura, the archipelago is one of the Spanish communities furthest from the average results obtained at European level in terms of first employment and family emancipation. A situation which, for the Canaries, has worsened in recent years. And, as in the rest of Spain, it has helped fuel the successive movements of milleuristas, young graduates lamenting the fact that they earn just €1,000 for their first job, and nimilleuristas, who in the crisis years reported that they didn't even earn that much.
When on June 30, 2005, Spain passed the law on same-sex marriage, it became the fourth country in the world to have such legislation, after Holland, Belgium and Canada, but the first with regard to the possibility of adoption, also included in the law. In 2018, marriages between same-sex couples totaled 4,726, or 2.9% of all marriages. Although not as large as MADO (Madrid Orgullo), the pride march that attracts over a million people every year, the Gay Pride of Maspalomas on Gran Canaria has built up a certain notoriety by bringing together over 100,000 people at its May parade since 2004. And in June 2019, the 18th LGBTQ event in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria sent a clear message to the various political parties that there should be no regression in this area.
6th community for Erasmus
Strong decentralization and the importance of private denominational education are the two main characteristics of the Spanish school system. It is based on 3 layers: pre-school education, school education and university education. In accordance with the European Higher Education Area, the Spanish higher education system has been composed of 3 levels since 2007: Bachelor, Master and Doctorate. As in the rest of Spain, the community is responsible for education up to higher education. The latter is the responsibility of the State. The Canary Islands have two universities, the oldest, created in 1927, is the University of La Laguna (ULL) in Tenerife and the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC), created in 1989. 2012 saw the opening of the first private institution of higher education in the Canary Islands, in La Orotava, Tenerife. And for the record, the Canary Islands was the first community to introduce emotional education in colleges since 2014. A subject that would have dropped the dropout rate, common in the Canary Islands.
