Due to its geographic situation and climate, Spain has been traditionally a destination for people coming from rich European countries. Many North European citizens have chosen to live along the Spanish coast and enjoy the warm weather and highly developed social facilities. However, around the end of the last century, Spanish immigration patterns changed: the largest numbers of immigrants were not attracted by the good weather so much, but by employment opportunities. During the years before the crisis, the economic growth model in Spain focused mainly on the construction industry, leading to an incessant demand for unskilled labour, especially in regions where the construction had a higher impact (the Mediterranean provinces and Madrid). The high economic growth rates in these years and the particular economic growth model attracted immigrants with different expectations to those who came in previous decades. The new residents were seeking now employment opportunities that they could not find in their home countries. In this work, we focus on the location-decision problem that potential immigrants face before locating to a new destination, considering the economic and geographical differences across alternative destinations. We analyze this question for 50 Spanish provinces. Most of the literature related to this issue has studied the determinants of immigration flows at country level (see, for instance, the work by Pedersen et al., 2008 and Longhi et al., 2009). Studies on international migration on a regional scale are much scarcer.

A common finding in the migration literature refers to the existence of agglomeration or network effects. The immigrant seems to adopt a self-selected spatial choice behaviour that leads to geographical clusters in relation to different features: tourism, labour market, education, among others. Thus a location migration