Two rides, two stories from Spain
I have a small habit: when I get into an Uber or a Bolt in a new place, I try to start a conversation. Sometimes I get silence. Sometimes I get a whole life story between the airport and the hotel. This time I got two.
The first ride was with a middle-aged woman from Venezuela. She earns about 400 euros a month, so she shares a flat with other people - a place of her own is simply out of reach. Still, when I asked how life in Spain compares with life back home, she did not hesitate. There is no comparison, she said. Corruption and a collapsing economy were bad enough, and then an earthquake came on top. Spaniards, she said, are friendly and warm toward newcomers, and the cultures are more alike than you would expect.
The second ride was in Madrid, with a young man from Morocco who spoke excellent English. There is so much demand for drivers that he keeps getting new offers and has to turn some down. In his view, Spaniards aim for other professions, so hotels, restaurants and rideshare apps lean heavily on people like him. Back home, he said, the problem is corruption. Morocco is a phosphate giant, but the money rarely reaches ordinary people. So young people leave.
Then we drifted to a bigger subject: families. He was convinced that Spain will have to accept immigration whether it likes it or not, and that Spanish women put career and personal growth first. He sees traditional roles as something that once served a purpose, and he reads the popularity of the "tradwife" trend as a response to something missing in society.
I keep hearing versions of this story from many places, not only from these two drivers. So I checked what the numbers say.
The core of it is real. Spain's fertility rate was 1.10 children per woman in 2024, one of the lowest in the world. Women have their first child at around 31-32, and young Spaniards leave their parents' home at about 30, compared with 26 in the EU as a whole.
But the numbers do not tell the story he told. Surveys show that Spaniards still want about two children, the same as a few decades ago. The main reasons they do not have them are the lack of a partner and the lack of stability: housing, work, money. That is not a story about women who stopped wanting families. It is a story about people who cannot afford to start one at the age when they would like to.
Divorce is a similar case. It is often said that Spain has the highest divorce rate in Europe, but in 2024 it was 1.8 per 1000 inhabitants, slightly below the EU average. Latvia, Lithuania and the Nordic countries are higher. What has changed more is that fewer people marry at all. As for women being less happy, I found no data that supports it. Across the EU the gap in reported happiness is small.
Still, something is clearly shifting in how people build lives and relationships, and it is worth talking about. I would just rather blame the housing market than half of the population.
What stayed with me is the mix of things. Life in Spain is not easy for either of my drivers, yet both talked about it as a step forward, and both were generous with their time. I told them a bit about Poland, where we are also meeting more and more people from South America, and it felt like we were describing the same big story from different ends.