Spain has a total of 70 functional urban areas (FUAs), or metropolitan areas, according to the European Union's definition of these zones. Each FUA is made up of a city and all the municipalities that form its functional environment.
To determine if a municipality belongs to a functional urban area, the criterion used is employment: if 15% or more of its employed population commutes to the reference city for work reasons, then it belongs to that FUA.
In 2017, the Spanish functional urban areas with the largest population were Madrid (6.71 million inhabitants), Barcelona (4.96 million), and Valencia (1.72 million), according to the latest data from the report Urban Indicators published by the National Institute of Statistics (INE).
The fourth position corresponded to Seville (1.54 million), while Bilbao (1.03 million) was fifth.
The rest of the Spanish metropolitan areas already have less than a million inhabitants. After the first five were Málaga (858,731 inhabitants), Zaragoza (756,296), Palma de Mallorca (678,611), Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (630,413), and Murcia (624,658).
The following graph shows the ranking of the 70 Spanish functional urban areas according to their population in 2017:
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