section_path: Demographics
section_name: Demographics
paragraph_text: Demographics
  
  The population of Madrid has overall increased since the city became the capital of Spain in the mid-sixteenth century, and has stabilised at approximately 3,000,000 since the 1970s.
  
  From 1970 until the mid-1990s, the population dropped. This phenomenon, which also affected other European cities, was caused in part by the growth of satellite suburbs at the expense of the downtown region within the city proper.
  
  The demographic boom accelerated in the late-1990s and early first decade of the 21st century due to immigration in parallel with a surge in Spanish economic growth.
  
  The wider Madrid region is the EU region with the highest average life expectancy at birth. The average life expectancy was 82.2 years for males and 87.8 for females in 2016.
  
  As the capital city of Spain, the city has attracted many immigrants from around the world, with most of the immigrants coming from Latin American countries. In 2020, around 76% of the registered population was Spain-born, while, regarding the foreign-born population (24%), the bulk of it relates to the Americas (around 16% of the total population), and a lesser fraction of the population is born in other European, Asian and African countries.
  
  As of 2019, the fastest-growing group of immigrants were Venezuelans, who consisted of a population of 60,000 in Madrid alone. This made them the second-largest community of foreign origin at the time after Ecuadorians, with a population of 88,000.
  
  Regarding religious beliefs, according to a 2019 Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (CIS) survey with a sample size of 469 respondents, 20.7% of respondents in Madrid identify themselves as practising Catholics, 45.8% as non-practising Catholics, 3.8% as believers of another religion, 11.1% as agnostics, 3.6% as indifferent towards religion, and 12.8% as atheists. The remaining 2.1% did not state their religious beliefs.
  
  The Madrid metropolitan area comprises Madrid and the surrounding municipalities. According to Eurostat, the "metropolitan region" of Madrid has a population of slightly more than 6.271 million people covering an area of 4,609.7 km 2 (1,780 sq mi). It is the largest in Spain and the second largest in the European Union.