Share of daily smokers in Spain in 2022, by autonomous community

According to the latest reports, Extremadura was the Spanish autonomous community that featured the highest consumption of tobacco, as a quarter of its population reported to be daily smokers in 2022. Most of the Spanish regions, however, registered a prevalence of tobacco use of over 17 percent with the exception of the communities of Melilla and the Basque Country. Andalusia ranked, on the other hand, as the Spanish autonomous community with the highest number of smokers, reaching over 1.4 million daily smokers in 2022.

The demographics of tobacco use in Spain

In Spain, an average of 22 percent of the population reported to smoke in 2022, with 20 percent of them being daily smokers. Former smokers accounted for 22 percent of the population, whereas more than half of Spaniards represented the non-smoking community of the Mediterranean country. Approximately 7.9 million people were daily smokers in Spain as of 2022, of which around 3.3 million were women and about 4.5 million were men.

Smoking and cancer

It is very clear these days that there is a direct connection between smoking and cancer. Lung cancer is the fourth most commonly diagnosed type of cancer in Spain with almost 30 thousand new cases estimated for 2021, according to the most recent studies. The number of deaths as a result of lung cancer has maintained over 20 thousand cases in the last few years. Lung cancer deaths in men outnumbered by far the deaths in women, with over 16.5 thousand cases among the male population in comparison with 5.2 thousand cases among their female co-nationals in 2020. Also that year, deaths as a consequence of lung tumors were most common among the population aged 65 to 74.