![]() So even though the settlement pattern appears sparse, people are actually quite tightly packed together. ![]() This means that the “lived density” for Spain is in fact 737 people per km², rather than 93. But only 13 per cent of them are lived in. Spain contains within it more than 505,000 1km squares. Yet characterising Spain as a sparsely populated country does not reflect the experience on the ground – as anyone who knows Barcelona or Madrid can tell you. The reasons for this date back to Medieval times, as Daniel Oto-Peralías at the University of St Andrews has explained. This is borne out in the map, where much of Spain appears to be empty much more so than any other large European country. It has a population density of 93 people per km², giving the impression of a sparsely populated country. The Spanish distributionĪ good way to understand this measure is to look at Spain. I call this figure “lived density”, since it provides a way of seeing the kinds of population densities that people experience in their day-to-day lives, within built-up areas. This is the so-called “ blue banana”, or dorsale européenne (European backbone), identified by French geographer Roger Brunet in 1989, and it is home to more than 110m people.īut we can get further clarity still by honing in on “built-up” density, which takes into account only those 1km² areas with people living in them. For example, we can see an area of high population density extending in a rough arc from north-west England down to Milan, with a little break in the Alps. This bird’s eye view helps us to understand the wider context.
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