More cinemas, restaurants, shops, bowling alleys and hundreds of parking spaces. The Community of Madrid will lead the comeback of shopping centers until 2025 with 306,462 new square meters spread over eight shopping centers. These projects gain established leadership, it is in the center of Spain where there are more square meters of shopping centers: in total, they account for 19.7% of the commercial offer in the country.
Currently, in Madrid there are 3.2 million square meters of shopping centers and parks, a figure that places it even above Andalusia. The largest community in Spain by area will open nine shopping centers by 2025, totaling 170,364 square meters of retail area.
Specifically, Andalusia covers 18.5% of the area of shopping centers in the country distributed among 116 centers and has several plans to expand its spaces, but not as ambitious as those in Madrid. Companies in the sector plan to open nine centers in Andalusia between now and 2025 with eight openings.
Madrid projects are designed on a large scale. Of the three shopping centers of more than 90,000 square meters that will be built in the coming years, two of them are in Madrid, and the third is located in Valencia. The largest is in the capital, a megaproject of General de Galerías Comerciales that became the largest in the city.
The largest shopping center in the city, Valdebebas Shopping, will be located in the Hortaleza neighborhood and will add 124,000 square meters of retail space to Madrid. The complex will surpass Plenilunio and Xanadú and will have 280 shops and restaurants and 6,500 parking spaces in a location close to the Adolfo Suárez Madrid Barajas Airport, but it does not yet have a specific opening date.
Also in Madrid, the Sola Live Center shopping center will open in the coming months by the promoter McKintosh Mall, which will add 90,000 more square meters of retail space. For its part, in the capital of the Valencian Community, the developer Aquila Capital will add 92,000 square meters of commercial area in the region, which ranks third in the country by commercial area and number of centers. It is the only project planned in the Valencian Community between now and 2025, but it serves to maintain its third place as the third place of the ‘malls’ in Spain with 12% of the commercial area.
If all the projects in the promoters’ pipeline go ahead, Madrid would add a density of 510 square meters per thousand inhabitants, a figure only surpassed by Zaragoza (694 square meters per thousand inhabitants) and Las Palmas ( 551.7 square meters per thousand inhabitants).
In fourth place is Catalonia, which currently has 9.7% of the square meters of shopping centers in Spain. The community has fifty shopping centers, half that of Madrid and Andalusia. In the next three years, two new centers will be added to the country, which will barely add 22,500 square meters of commercial area.
Another community that will record a large increase in commercial activity until 2025, with the inauguration of a single retail park, is Galicia, where three centers will be opened that will add 93,000 square meters to the region.
The fifth community with the most presence of malls in the country is the Canary Islands. The archipelago has 43 centers and more than one million square meters of commercial area. For the next three years, the islands will inaugurate two new shopping center projects that will add 56,000 square meters.
Shopping malls, the return
In the last year, shopping centers throughout Spain have signed a year of growth and a return to normality after the Covid-19 hit. The flow to shopping centers and parks increased by 12.3% year-on-year, reaching 1,700 million visits. Despite the increase, the figure is still below pre-pandemic levels.
Those that have managed to exceed pre-pandemic levels are sales, which increased by 16.3% compared to last year and 1.8% compared to the data for 2019. In total, the sales of the shopping centers and parks totaled 47,763 million euros.
In addition to increasing the metrics, this has been a year of new projects for shopping centers in Spain. In 2022, seven new projects, four parks and three shopping centers have opened, contributing to the gross leasable area of 109,494 square meters. Over the next three years, thirty new projects for parks and shopping centers, seven centers and 23 shopping parks, are scheduled to start up.
Taking into account the volume transacted, the Aecc points out that 38 operations were registered during the year. With this, 1,808 million euros were exceeded and the highest figure since 2019 was recorded.
If all the projects on the table are finally carried out, the national stock of shopping centers would rise to 17.5 million square meters and a total of 607 complexes throughout the country, compared to the current 577.
