Average Height in Spain (Men & Women)

How tall Spaniards are today

Spanish men born in 1996 average 176.6 cm (5′9½″) and Spanish women 163.4 cm (5′4½″), according to estimates from the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC) used across this site. Spain ranks 41st of 200 countries for men and 44th for women. That is taller than Portugal and Morocco but still a few centimeters behind France and Germany.

The bigger story is how far Spain has come. Spanish men born in 1896 averaged just 162.3 cm in the same series, which means Spain added more than 14 cm to its men's average in a century. Much of that growth happened within living memory, and Spanish historians have mapped it in unusual detail thanks to military conscription records. This guide covers the current averages, the century of change, the setback during the Civil War and the early Franco years, the class gap in height, and how Spain compares with its neighbors.

What the numbers measure

Spain's estimates come from the same 2016 eLife study, which modeled mean height at age 18 for people born each year from 1896 to 1996 using measured heights only. Spain stands out in that dataset for the size of its late surge: men added 5.8 cm between the 1926 and 1956 cohorts and another 3.6 cm by 1976, reaching 176.6 cm for those born in 1996.

Each figure describes a birth cohort. The headline numbers here describe Spaniards born in 1996, measured as young adults. They are not averages of every adult in Spain today, which would include older generations who grew up in much poorer conditions and are shorter.

A century of rapid growth

Over the century, men gained 14.3 cm and women 12.3 cm. Gains were modest for cohorts born before the late 1920s: 3.5 cm in 30 years for both sexes. Then growth accelerated. Men born in 1956 were 5.8 cm taller than men born in 1926, and men born in 1976 were another 3.6 cm taller. The pace has since slowed, with men born in 1996 just 1.4 cm taller than the 1976 cohort.

The NCD-RisC paper lists Spain among the Southern European countries where height was still rising for the most recent cohorts, unlike parts of northern Europe where gains have stopped. Spain started further back, so it still had room to grow.

A study by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), directed by demographer Julio Pérez and reported by EROSKI Consumer in 2011, reached similar conclusions using Spain's National Health Survey (Encuesta Nacional de Salud), which the state has run since 1987. It found that a man born in 1910 averaged about 166 cm and a woman about 155 cm, rising to about 177 cm and 162 cm for people born in 1982. Pérez attributed Spain's unusually fast gains to its rapid social, economic and demographic change, noting that Spain had Europe's highest mortality in the early 20th century and now has one of the world's highest life expectancies. The report doesn't say whether the survey heights were measured or self-reported, which may explain why its early-cohort figures are higher than the NCD-RisC estimates.

The conscription record

Spain is one of the best-documented countries in historical height research, because young men were measured when called up for military service. Our World in Data, summarizing a 2014 study by Ayuda, notes that literate Spanish conscripts measured between 1850 and 1958 were nearly 1 cm taller than illiterate ones. That study also found that agricultural workers were 3.6 cm shorter than highly qualified non-manual workers, a sign that childhood conditions varied sharply with family occupation.

Conscription data have limits. They cover men only, they measure young men who may not have finished growing, and call-up ages changed over time. The CSIC study made this point directly: earlier research relied on Ministry of Defence data for men, and the health-survey approach was a way to include women.

The Civil War and the hungry 1940s

The most striking interruption in Spain's growth came with the Civil War (1936 to 1939) and the years that followed. In a 2021 working paper, economic historians José Miguel Martínez Carrión and Javier Puche used military recruitment records to measure the effect. They found that the rise in adolescent height during the first third of the 20th century was cut short during the war. Average height fell in the 1940s, and the decline lasted until 1947 nationally and until 1953 in some rural areas of the interior.

The title of their paper, Famine and Malnutrition in Franco's Spain, signals the explanation they explore: hunger and poor nutrition during the war and the postwar period. The Madrid study described below points to the same years, citing economic crisis and autarky, the regime's policy of economic self-sufficiency. Height captures these conditions because it is set largely in childhood. Children who went hungry in the early 1940s carried the effect into adulthood, and it showed up years later when they were measured as conscripts.

The NCD-RisC series, with its 30-year steps, smooths over this dip. It shows only that the 1926 to 1956 period ended with much taller adults. The conscription studies fill in what happened in between.

Rich and poor in Madrid

A 2019 study by Cristina Varea and colleagues in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health examined 43,633 conscripts from five Madrid districts, born between 1915 and 1953 and measured at about age 21. The researchers grouped Tetuán and Vallecas as lower-class districts and Centro, Salamanca and Chamberí as middle- and upper-class districts.

The class gap was 2.11 cm for the 1915 cohort and narrowed to 1.20 cm by 1953, but in between it widened to a peak of 4.61 cm for the 1927 cohort. Lower-class height fell by 1.69 cm between the 1915 and 1926 cohorts, rose sharply in the early 1930s, and then stagnated from the mid-1930s to the late 1940s. The authors linked that stagnation to the Civil War and to the repression, economic crisis and autarky of the early Franco dictatorship. In the wealthier districts, height kept rising through the same years.

Even the best-off Madrid conscripts remained below the WHO growth reference of 176.54 cm at age 19 throughout the period studied. Today's average for young Spanish men, 176.6 cm, sits right at that reference value.

What drove Spain's growth

None of the sources reviewed here attribute Spain's height gains to a single cause, but the research on height in general points to a familiar set of drivers. Our World in Data describes nutrition as one of the strongest determinants of human height, and notes that most stunting happens in the first two years of life. It cites work by Grasgruber and colleagues finding that, in high-income countries, the ratio of high-quality animal protein to low-quality plant protein in the diet was the strongest predictor of male height, and a separate analysis linking male height closely to child mortality. Disease matters because a sick child absorbs fewer nutrients and burns more energy fighting infection, leaving less for growth.

Spain's 20th century fits that framework closely. Pérez's observation that Spain went from Europe's highest mortality in the early 1900s to one of the world's longest life expectancies describes the same improvement in childhood health that shows up in height. The conscription studies show the reverse case too: when food became scarce in the 1940s, growth stalled, especially among poorer families. And the narrowing of the Madrid class gap from 4.61 cm to 1.20 cm between the 1927 and 1953 cohorts suggests that, as conditions improved, poorer children caught up.

Our World in Data also notes that catch-up growth is possible when conditions improve, which helps explain how cohorts born in the hungry years could be followed so quickly by much taller ones.

Height across Spanish generations

Because the gains were so recent, the height difference between Spanish generations is unusually large. In the NCD-RisC series, a man born in 1926 averaged 165.8 cm and his grandson born in 1996 averaged 176.6 cm, a difference of 10.8 cm. For women, the equivalent gap is 8.8 cm, from 154.6 cm to 163.4 cm. Family photos in which grandparents look strikingly small beside their grandchildren reflect a real, measurable change, not just the stoop of old age.

Women's height: a stall in mid-century

Because conscription records cover only men, women's history is harder to trace. The CSIC study filled part of the gap and found something unexpected: Spanish women born between 1939 and 1958 did not exceed an average of 160 cm, while men born in the same years kept growing steadily. Pérez said the available data could neither confirm nor rule out any hypothesis for the stall.

The NCD-RisC series shows a related pattern. Women gained 4.9 cm between the 1926 and 1956 cohorts while men gained 5.8 cm, and the sex gap widened from 11.2 cm to 13.2 cm over the century. Spanish women born in 1996 average 163.4 cm, which puts them 0.4 cm above Portuguese women but 1.2 cm and 1.5 cm below Italian and French women.

Spain and its neighbors

Spain sits in the middle of Western Europe. Spanish men are 3.7 cm taller than Portuguese men but 3.1 cm shorter than French men and 1.2 cm shorter than Italian men. Across the Strait of Gibraltar, Moroccan men average 170.4 cm, 6.2 cm shorter. Italy is a useful comparison, since both countries were relatively poor Mediterranean societies a century ago and grew taller quickly in the second half of the 20th century. In the NCD-RisC series, Italian men born in 1896 averaged 164.7 cm, 2.4 cm taller than Spanish men of the same cohort; by the 1996 cohort the gap had shrunk to 1.2 cm, because Spain gained 14.3 cm over the century against Italy's 13.1 cm.

Putting Spanish heights in context

A Spanish man of average height for the 1996 cohort is about 5′9½″, close to the 176 cm page on this site. A Spanish woman of average height is about 5′4½″.

These averages describe young adults. Older Spaniards are noticeably shorter on average, since men born in 1956 averaged 171.6 cm, five centimeters below their grandsons. If you're comparing yourself with "the average Spaniard," the right benchmark depends on your generation. For a precise comparison with Spanish men or women born in 1996, use the height percentile calculator, or browse all countries on the average height hub.