94.6% of Overnight Stays on Crete Are by Foreign Visitors, the EU's Highest

Nights filed by where the guest lives

The table behind this page counts nights spent at tourist accommodation establishments: hotels, holiday and other short-stay accommodation, and campsites, including parks for caravans and motor homes. Each night is recorded in the region where the establishment stands and filed under the guest's country of residence, which is either the country the region belongs to or any other. Residence decides, not passport: a Greek citizen who lives in Germany is a foreign guest on Kriti, and a German citizen settled in Athens is a domestic one.

The regions are NUTS 2 regions, the middle level of the three into which Eurostat divides the Union's territory for regional statistics. In Spain they are the autonomous communities plus the cities of Ceuta and Melilla, in Greece the thirteen administrative regions, and Estonia, Cyprus, Latvia, Luxembourg and Malta are each counted as a single region. For 2025 the table carries both the foreign and the total count for 244 regions, covering all 27 Member States.

The figure used throughout is the foreign count divided by the total. Eurostat's regional table publishes the two counts but not that ratio, so every share quoted here is derived by Silver Data Lab, and so is every gap between two shares.

Islands at the top

Kriti, the Greek island region, has the highest share in the Union: of its 35.2 million nights in 2025, 33.3 million were spent by guests who live outside Greece, or 94.6%. Malta follows at 94.3%, then Ionia Nisia, the Ionian Islands off Greece's western coast, at 93.5%. Cyprus, which the table labels Kýpros, records 92.8%, and Notio Aigaio, the South Aegean islands that include the Cyclades and the Dodecanese, 92.0%. All five are islands or groups of islands, and three of them are Greek.

Three more regions clear 90%: Jadranska Hrvatska, the Adriatic coast and islands of Croatia, at 91.6%, and two regions at 90.9%, Tirol, the Austrian Alpine state, and Illes Balears, Spain's Balearic Islands. Guests from abroad account for more than half of all nights in 66 of the 244 regions; in the other 178 the majority belongs to residents of the region's own country.

Large holiday regions that host their own country

The foot of the ranking is not a list of places tourists pass by. Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the German state on the Baltic coast, hosted 30.0 million nights in 2025, the third-largest total among Germany's 38 regions and more than the 20.4 million of the Ionian Islands. Fewer than one million of those nights were spent by guests from abroad, a share of 3.2%. Schleswig-Holstein, Germany's northernmost state, between the North Sea and the Baltic, hosted 34.8 million nights with a foreign share of 5.7%.

Two Romanian regions come next to it. Sud-Est, the south-eastern region that includes the country's Black Sea coast, records 3.9%, and Sud-Vest Oltenia, in the south-west of Romania, 4.1%. Świętokrzyskie, the province around Kielce in south-central Poland, completes the five lowest at 5.0%. Below all of them is Mayotte, the French department in the Indian Ocean, at 1.7%, a share resting on 2,367 foreign nights out of 135,824.

Twenty-one regions are below 10%. Eleven are German, five Polish and three Romanian, and the remaining two are French overseas departments, Mayotte and La Réunion.

The widest gaps run inside countries

Greece shows how far apart two regions of one country can sit. Ten of its thirteen regions host more foreign than domestic nights, among them Attiki, the Athens region, at 75.4%. In Dytiki Makedonia, the inland region of north-western Greece, guests from abroad account for 14.5% of 0.37 million nights. Kriti and Dytiki Makedonia are 80.1 percentage points apart, the widest spread between the highest and the lowest region of any Member State.

Spain has the second widest, 76.3 points. The Balearic Islands record 90.9% and the Canary Islands 87.7%, against 14.6% in Castilla-La Mancha, in the centre of the country. Czechia, Austria and Hungary follow, each with a spread of between 66 and 74 points: Praha at 86.1% against Střední Morava, in central Moravia, at 13.1%; Tirol at 90.9% against Burgenland, Austria's easternmost state, at 21.1%; and Budapest at 84.2% against Észak-Magyarország, the north of Hungary, at 17.4%.

The narrowest spreads are Sweden's and Ireland's. In Sweden, 21.4 points separate Stockholm, at 35.9%, from Östra Mellansverige, the east-central region, at 14.5%. In Ireland, 22.6 points separate Eastern and Midland, the region around Dublin, at 71.5%, from Southern, the south of the country, at 48.9%.

The capital usually leads its country

Twenty-two Member States are divided into more than one region, and in fourteen of them the region containing the capital has the highest foreign share in the country. In some the lead is large. Bucureşti-Ilfov, Bucharest and the county around it, records 60.8%, and no other Romanian region reaches 16%: Centru, in central Romania, comes second at 15.8%, 45.0 points behind. Praha's 86.1% is 35.6 points ahead of Czechia's second region, Severozápad, in the north-west, at 50.5%.

In the other eight the leader is an island, a coast or an Alpine region. Kriti leads Greece, where Attiki is seventh, and the Balearic Islands lead Spain, where the Comunidad de Madrid is fourth at 57.5%. Tirol is ahead of Vienna, which records 82.8%. Bolzano, the mainly German-speaking province in the Italian Alps, records 72.1%, just ahead of Lazio, the Rome region, at 71.6%. Madeira, the Portuguese island in the Atlantic, also records 82.8%, ahead of Grande Lisboa, the Lisbon region, at 80.8%. Adriatic Croatia is ahead of the City of Zagreb at 79.9%. Severoiztochen, on Bulgaria's Black Sea coast, records 75.2%, with Yugozapaden, the region of Sofia, third at 49.5%. And Åland, the autonomous Finnish islands between Finland and Sweden, records 50.4% against 45.6% in Helsinki-Uusimaa.

The table records where guests live, not why they came. Business travel, conferences and air connections may weigh on a capital region as much as holidays do, and nothing in these counts separates one purpose from another.

Where no region has a foreign majority

Germany, Poland and Sweden have no region where guests from abroad account for half the nights. Germany's highest share is Berlin's, 41.4%; Sweden's is Stockholm's, 35.9%; and Poland's is that of Warszawski stołeczny, the Warsaw capital region, at 32.4%. France is one region away from the same position: Ile de France, the Paris region, reaches 54.2%, and the other 26 French regions are all below half.

At the opposite end, every region of Croatia and of Slovenia is above half. Sjeverna Hrvatska, in the north of Croatia, has the lowest share of the four Croatian regions at 56.0%, which is higher than the top share of any region in Germany, Poland or Sweden.

The same extremes a year earlier

The ranking is not one year's accident. In 2024 the same five regions led, in the same order, with Kriti then at 94.4%. Four of the five lowest were also the same. The fifth was Kujawsko-pomorskie, in north-central Poland, which is sixth lowest in 2025.