Demography
The local Register office show a total resident population for Bilbao of 355,731 as of 2009.
The first credible data about Bilbao population are post-1550. It is known that in 1530, Biscay had approximately 65,000 inhabitants, a number that could have been reduced by plagues that struck the city in 1517, 1530, 1564–68, and 1597–1601, the last one being specially devastating. These trend in adverse situations for population growth was maintained until the nineteenth century. Since then, Bilbao experienced an exponential population growth thanks to the industrialization of the area. After a peak of 433,115 inhabitants in 1982, the municipalities of the Txorierri valley were disannexated, with the corresponding loss of its people.
Of the 355,731 people residing in Bilbao as of 2009, only 114,220 (32.1%) were born inside the municipality. Of the remaining, 114,908 were born in other Biscayan towns, while 7,225 were born in the other two Basque provinces; 85,789 came from the rest of Spain (mainly Castile-León and Galicia), and finally 33,537 were foreigners. There are 127 different nationalities registered in Bilbao, although 60 of them contain fewer than 10 people. On the other hand, the largest foreign communities are the Bolivian and the Colombian, with 4,879 and 3,730 respectively. They are followed by the Romanian (2,248), the Moroccan (2,058), the Ecuadorian (1,832), the Chinese (1,390), the Brazilian (1,273) and the Paraguayan, with 1,204 inhabitants.
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