More than 16,000 weddings in 20 years since legalization of same-sex marriage

20 years after the introduction of marriage equality in Spain, Catalonia has seen more than 16,000 same-sex marriages take place since 2005.

Initially, more than 60% of same-sex marriages were between men, but the trend reversed in 2017, and since then, there have been more and more between women.

According to the latest data, in 2023, there were 11% more same-sex marriages than the previous year, with more than a thousand held, a figure well above the average of 850 annually over these 20 years.

The one thousand marriage threshold was only surpassed before in 2017 and 2006.

The increase in 2023 came at a time when the total number of marriages in Catalonia, among all types of couples, decreased slightly. There were a total of 27,068 nuptials that year, far from the recent highs of more than 30,000 each year between 2005-2008.

"Before and after"

Cati Pallars, from the LGTBI+ Families Association, says the legalization of same-sex marriage marked "a before and after" for the collective.

"It makes me very happy, not because of the number, but because people are making use of this right," she tells the Catalan News Agency (ACN), arguing that this "places" the LGBTQI+ community in society.

"It is a reaffirmation that we are a part of society and that we have the civil rights we deserve, like any other person," she says. "Just as we pay taxes, we must also have the same civil rights as everyone else has."

4% of marriages in Catalonia are same-sex

In Catalonia in 2023, some 4% of all marriages were same-sex, similar to the Spanish average of 3.9%.

Compared to other regions across Spain, Catalonia has the 5th highest proportion of same-sex marriages of the total.

This ranking is led by the Canary Islands, with 6.5% of weddings, followed by Madrid (5.2%), the Balearic Islands (4.8%) and the Valencian Community (4.4%).

The regions with the fewest same-sex marriages proportionally are Extremadura (2.6%), Galicia (2.6%), and Aragon (2.4%), while the autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla were below 2%, where only 5 of the 342 nuptials last year were same-sex.