Which languages
does your Costa Blanca
website really need?

Who actually lives
in Alicante province.

The most useful source is the annual report from ASTI Alicante, which compiles the National Statistics Institute (INE) register figures for the province. Its 2026 edition uses data from 1 January 2025. These are the largest foreign nationalities, plus a few smaller groups that come up often in conversations about websites:

Three things stand out once you group those figures by the language people are likely to use.

English still leads, but it’s shrinking

British residents fell by 1,882 in a year, the third annual drop in a row. Even so, UK, Irish, US and Canadian nationals add up to about 76,593 people. English is also the language many Dutch, Belgian, Scandinavian and German residents fall back on when they deal with local businesses. For most coastal businesses, English remains the obvious second language.

Spanish-speaking foreigners are the fastest-growing group

This is the one people miss. Colombia moved into second place after adding 8,227 residents in a single year. Add Venezuela, Argentina, Ecuador, Cuba and the rest of Spanish-speaking Latin America and you get roughly 105,944 foreign residents whose first language is Spanish. They sit on top of the 1.54 million Spanish nationals. An English-only site is quietly skipping the biggest audience in the province.

The “third language” groups are smaller than they feel

Dutch and Belgian residents together number 32,124. Many Belgians here are Flemish, but not all, so don’t assume Dutch for every Belgian customer. Germany has 15,117. Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland together have 11,846. Russian and Ukrainian nationals total 55,810, though you shouldn’t assume which language a Ukrainian customer prefers. Ask them.

None of these groups is large enough to justify a full translation for every business. For some businesses, in some towns, they are the whole customer base. That’s why the next table matters more.

A caveat on the census: these figures count people registered on the municipal padrón. Part-year residents and second-home owners often never register, so in coastal towns the real number of non-Spanish speakers around in winter is likely higher than the table suggests.

The province average
hides the real picture.

A café in Elche and a café in Calp don’t need the same website. The share of foreign residents ranges from about one in seven to more than two in three, depending on where you are:

The mix changes as much as the size. In Benidorm, the 26,862 foreign residents are spread almost evenly: 6,879 from the Americas, 6,744 from Europe outside the EU, 6,392 from the EU and 3,830 from Asia. In Calp, EU citizens are the largest group (6,128). In the Vega Baja, British, Moroccan, Ukrainian and Russian nationals together make up half of all foreign residents.

If you work in one town, look up that town. If you cover a wider area, look at the places your best customers actually come from. The ASTI report has a table for every municipality in the province.

Who flies in matters
if you serve visitors.

Restaurants, tour operators, rental companies and anyone else living off visitors should look at a second dataset: the airport. Alicante-Elche handled a record 19,950,394 passengers in 2025, according to Aena. The biggest country markets for the year were:

In the March–October high season alone, France (632,434), Poland (627,110, up almost 20%), Norway (over 600,000) and Sweden (around 517,000) each passed half a million passengers.

Read these numbers carefully. A passenger on the Amsterdam route isn’t necessarily Dutch, and every return trip is counted twice. Still, the gap between residents and visitors is telling. About 15,000 Germans live in the province, but routes to and from Germany carried over 1.2 million passengers. Poland barely registers as a resident group, with fewer than 6,000 residents, yet it’s now a million-passenger market. For a visitor business, that can matter more than the census.

Tourism is also seasonal. Scandinavian travellers are far more noticeable in winter than in August. If most of your winter trade is Norwegian, a single well-made Norwegian page can earn its keep even though Norwegians are only 1% of foreign residents.

Your inbox beats
any census.

Regional data tells you what’s possible. Your own data tells you what’s happening. Before paying for a translation, spend an hour on these five checks:

A simple way
to decide.

Here’s the rule I use: never publish a language you can’t reply in. A Dutch page makes a promise. If the Dutch enquiry gets a reply in English three days later, the page has done more harm than good.

After that, think in three levels:

Remember the upkeep. Every language multiplies every future edit: new prices, holiday hours, a new service, a blog post. Three languages means three versions of each change, each checked by someone who reads that language.

How that plays out in practice

These are hypothetical examples, but they reflect the kind of choices I’d suggest:

Build it so Google
can find each language.

A translated page only brings in customers if search engines can find it and show it to the right people. Google publishes clear guidance on this. The key points for a small business site:

Give every language its own address

Use separate URLs, such as /en/, /es/ and /nl/. Google recommends different URLs for each language version rather than switching language with cookies or browser settings, and it doesn’t recommend URL parameters like ?lang=nl. This is why a translation widget does little for search: the translated text usually has no address of its own for Google to index.

Keep one language per page

Google detects a page’s language from its visible content, not from the code. A page that mixes English navigation with Spanish text and a Dutch footer sends a mixed signal. Translate the menu, buttons and footer too.

Don’t redirect people automatically

Google advises against automatically sending visitors to another language version based on where they seem to be. A British homeowner browsing from Spain doesn’t want to be pushed to Spanish. Let people choose, and remember their choice.

Tell Google which pages belong together

Use hreflang annotations so Google knows the English, Spanish and Dutch pages are versions of the same thing. Each version must list all the others and itself. If two pages don’t point to each other, Google ignores the annotations. Add an x-default for everyone else:

<!-- On every language version of the page, list all versions, itself included -->
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://example.com/en/dentist-torrevieja/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es" href="https://example.com/es/dentista-torrevieja/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="nl" href="https://example.com/nl/tandarts-torrevieja/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://example.com/en/dentist-torrevieja/" />

Translate the search terms, not just the words

People search in their own language. A Norwegian looking for a dentist types “tannlege Torrevieja”, a Dutch visitor types “tandarts Torrevieja” and a German types “Zahnarzt Torrevieja”. Put those words in the page title, heading and URL of each version. Check what people actually search in each language rather than translating your English keywords literally.

Use machine translation as a draft, not the final copy

Google’s spam policies list automated translation among the techniques that count as scaled content abuse when it produces many pages that add little value. Machine translation is a fine starting point. Have a fluent speaker review every page before it goes live, especially prices, legal terms and anything about health or money.

Label languages by name, not by flag

Write each option in its own language, such as English, Español, Nederlands, Deutsch or Norsk, and put the switcher in the same place on every page. Flags stand for countries, not languages: a Belgian might want Dutch or French, and a Colombian isn’t represented by the Spanish flag. Link each option to the matching page, not the homepage.

Translate the whole journey

The parts people forget are the ones that lose enquiries: form labels, error messages, the “thank you” message, the automatic email reply, the WhatsApp greeting, image alt text, and the page title and description that appear in search results. A Dutch page that leads to an English-only form feels unfinished.

One Google Business Profile, many languages

Don’t create a separate Business Profile for each language. One profile per location is the rule. Instead, reply to each review in the language it was written in. It shows new customers, in their own language, that they’ll be understood.

What about Valencian? Valencian is co-official in the Comunitat Valenciana alongside Spanish. For most private businesses serving coastal residents and visitors, it’s a choice rather than the first gap to fill. It’s worth considering if you work with councils, schools or inland communities where it’s part of daily life. In a regulated sector, check language requirements with your gestor or professional body.

Start small,
then measure.

If you’re unsure, add languages in this order and let your data make the next decision:

1. Get English and Spanish right. Complete, accurate, and tested on a phone from search result to sent enquiry.
2. Measure for three months. Track enquiry languages, browser languages and search queries, as in section 04.
3. Add the next language one page at a time. Start with the page that brings in the most enquiries, usually a service page, and its contact form.
4. Check that it earns its place. If the new page brings enquiries you can handle, expand it. If it doesn’t after a season, remove it rather than leaving it to go out of date.

If you’re planning a new site, the Costa Blanca small business website guide covers the rest of the brief. Once each language is live, add it to your monthly maintenance checks so forms and details stay correct in every version.