Press release 13/05/2019
There were 1,629 marriages registered in the fourth quarter of 2018 in the Basque Country, up 1.9% on the previous year
In contrast, in the balance for 2018, the number of marriages in the Basque Country fell by 4.3% in 2018
In the fourth quarter of 2018, 1,629 marriages were registered in the Basque Country, which was an increase of 1.9% compared to the same quarter in 2017, according to Eustat data. Of the total number of marriages, 52 were between people of the same sex (29 between men and 23 between women) and the remaining 1,577 were heterosexual marriages.
The percentage of civil weddings stood at 85.1%, up 0.9 points on the same quarter of 2017, and 7.7 points up on the third quarter of 2018. This percentage refers only to heterosexual marriages, to which a further 3.2 points should be added for marriages between people of the same sex, all of which were civil.
1,550 men and 1,530 women resident in the Basque Country entered into marriage. For 1,283 spouses (82.8%) this was their first marriage, whilst 21 widowers and 246 divorcees remarried. The percentage of women entering into marriage for the first time was slightly lower than that of men, with single women who married representing 81.8% of the total (1,251 women); 11 widows and 268 divorcees also remarried.
The percentage of married women of foreign nationality rose by almost 2 percentage points
In the fourth quarter of 2018, 12.3% of new husbands and 18.1% of new wives were foreign nationals. The percentage of foreign wives was 1.7 percentage points higher than the same quarter of the previous year (16.4%), whereas the percentage of foreign husbands was down slightly (-0.3 percentage points).
Taking the province into account, 227 couples fixed their residence in Álava, 527 in Gipuzkoa and 779 in Bizkaia. The number of couples who fixed their residence outside of the Basque Country stood at 96.
Regarding the distribution of married couples according to the age of the spouses, in the fourth quarter of 2018, 90.2% of recently married men were over 30 years of age, whereas amongst recently married women this percentage stood at 82.6%. In men this proportion was identical to that of the same quarter of the previous year, while it decreased by 1.4 points among women (84.0%).
BALANCE FOR 2018
In the provisional data for 2018, the number of marriages for individuals resident in the Basque Country fell by 4.3% with regards to the previous year. The proportion of civil marriages exceeded the figure for 2017 by 2.2 percentage points, reaching 85.6% of the total, which included homosexual marriages.
For 2018 as a whole, 89.8% of husbands and 81.2% of wives entered into marriage at the age of 30 or over, a slightly lower percentage than in 2017 for men and a similar one for women (90.3% and 81.1%, respectively).
For further information:
Eustat - Euskal Estatistika Erakundea / Basque Statistics Institute
C/ Donostia-San Sebastián, 1 01010 Vitoria-Gasteiz
Press Service: servicioprensa@eustat.es Tel: 945 01 75 62