Ecuadorians in Spain
Ecuadorians in Spain have comprised a sizable community in Spain since the early 2000s. As of 2025, the number of immigrants from Ecuador residing in Spain, including those with Spanish citizenship, comprised 468,751.
Ecuadorians in Spain are the fifth largest diaspora community in Spain as of 2025, according to Spain's INE. The majority of Ecuadorians in Spain arrived during the early 2000s, during Ecuador's economic crisis and the consequent economic boom in Spain. Almost 500,000 Ecuadorians migrated to Spain from 1998 to 2008.
History and overview
Until the late 1990s, Ecuadorian diaspora in Spain numbered only a few thousands, as Ecuadorians preferred to move to the United States. After the economic crisis that affected Ecuador severely during 1998-2000, and coupled with changing laws in the U.S. regarding migration, Ecuadorians began to move massively to Spain after 1998, facilitated among others by the visa-free travel regime to the Schengen area Ecuadorians enjoyed that time. In the early 2000s, significantly more women moved to Spain than men. The main wave of Ecuadorian immigration in Spain took place between 1998 and 2005. Almost 500,000 Ecuadorians moved to Spain, and many more elsewhere in Europe. During this period, almost 170,000 Ecuadorians moved to the Community of Madrid.The first Ecuadorian communities in Spain began to develop in the 1940s; the first migrants were from Otavalo, and close to the 1990s some people from Loja moved to Spain.
In the early 2000s, there was a degree of chain migration. There were many migrants who migrated to Spain with support from friends or relatives living in Spain, and a large majority of them took low-paying jobs in the beginning. By 2002, significant amounts of Ecuadorians began to regularise their immigrant status in the country. After 2003, with the introduction of visa requirement for Ecuadorian citizens to enter Spain, the large wave of Ecuadorian immigration to Spain effectively stopped, though many more thousands of Ecuadorians continued to move to Spain until the 2008 Spanish crisis; many moved there in the premises of family unification. Many women found employment as domestic workers, while men were often employed in agriculture, construction or services.
The number of Ecuadorian citizens living in Spain peaked at 500,512 in the late months of 2009.
During the next nine years, until 2018, roughly 100,000 Ecuadorians left the country, mostly for Ecuador and other European countries during Spain's economic crisis of 2008–2014. However, most of the Ecuadorian-born residents of Spain stayed in the country despite the crisis, and tens of thousands of Ecuadorians acquired Spanish citizenship during the 2010s.
The community has began to grow again after 2018 with new arrivals. After 2018, Spain has seen a second wave of immigration from the Latin American countries.
However, in comparison with other Latin American countries, relatively few Ecuadorians are moving to Spain each year, due to the visa requirements and the lack of a convenient pathwats to move to the country. A small amount of Ecuadorians, since 2022, work in Spain with temporary visas to assist in the collection of the agricultural harvest.