🌍 How Rare Are You in Spain?
🇪🇸 Genetic Landscape of Spain
Spain's genetic identity was shaped by Iberian, Celtic, Roman, Visigothic, and crucially, Moorish (North African/Arab) heritage across 800 years of Al-Andalus. This creates a population that straddles Mediterranean and Atlantic genetic profiles. The Basque Country stands out with the highest Rh-negative blood frequency in the world and a language unrelated to any other. Galicia in the northwest has Celtic roots, while Andalusia in the south shows stronger Moorish genetic influence.
Names work differently here from most of Europe, and that changes what rarity means. Everyone carries two surnames, one from each parent — traditionally the father's first, though parents may now choose the order — so a family name survives in the written record long after it would have vanished elsewhere. Those names map onto the country: a Ferrer or a Puig points to Catalonia, an Etxeberria to the Basque Country, a Seoane or a Carballo to Galicia. Spain is officially multilingual, with Catalan, Basque, Galician and Aranese holding co-official status in their own territories. Further out, the Canary Islands lie closer to Morocco than to Madrid and still carry traces of the Guanche, the Berber population living there before Castile arrived in the fifteenth century.
🔢 The footnote under Spain's commonest surname
The INE, Spain's statistics office, publishes the most frequent surnames and given names. At 1 January 2025 the most frequent surname among all residents was García, held by 1,446,937 people. The most frequent given name was María Carmen among women, with 618,622, and Antonio among men, with 590,938. Those resident rows come from the Censo de Población. For babies born in 2024 the table switches to the Estadística de nacimientos and the answers change completely: Sofía, 3,325, and Mateo, 3,289. The 2025 edition was published on 23 April 2026.
Under that table sits footnote 3: Se refiere solo al primer apellido — it counts only the first surname. Article 49.2 of Ley 20/2011 has the two parents agree, before the birth is registered, the order in which their respective first surnames pass on, so a birth registered in Spain writes down a first surname and a second one. A ranking built on the first slot alone is a ranking of one of those two columns, which is why the footnote has to sit there before the number means anything. Same question for your own name: how rare is my name.
👁️ Eye Color
| Brown | 55% |
| Hazel | 14% |
| Green | 15% |
| Blue | 13% |
| Gray | 3% |
💇 Hair Color
| Dark Brown | 38% |
| Brown | 28% |
| Black | 18% |
| Blonde | 10% |
| Red | 2% |
| Gray | 4% |
🩸 Blood Type
| O+ | 36% |
| A+ | 34% |
| B+ | 7% |
| AB+ | 3% |
| O- | 9% |
| A- | 7% |
| B- | 2% |
| AB- | 2% |
Trait frequencies on this page come from public and institutional datasets — see Data Sources.
🧮 Calculate Your Rarity in Spain
Pick your eye colour, hair colour and blood type. The calculator uses Spain's own figures from the tables above, not world averages.
This is an estimate, not a measurement. It multiplies three national frequencies as if they were independent, and they are not: eye and hair colour share pigmentation genes, so a combination that tends to run together, such as blue eyes with blonde hair, is more common than the multiplication suggests, while one that rarely does, such as blue eyes with black hair, is rarer. Blood type is independent of both. The frequencies are national averages from public datasets — see Data Sources.
That number describes the body you were born with. Fraeon, our other site, does the same arithmetic for the part you chose: the films, series, games, books, anime and manga you have actually finished. Start your log →
✍️ A surname you can ask the state to respell
Article 53 of Ley 20/2011, de 21 de julio, del Registro Civil lets the registrar authorise a change of surname on the holder's own declaration, and its fourth item is la regularización ortográfica de los apellidos — respelling a surname into whichever official language matches the holder's origin or place of residence. The same item extends the idea to foreign surnames, adapting their sound to the spelling conventions of those languages. Article 50.4 handles given names: at the request of the person or their legal representative, the registrar substitutes the given name for its equivalent in any of Spain's languages.
That makes spelling something the register can be asked to change rather than something a family is stuck with. Because the change runs on a request from the person concerned, two people descended from the same line can sit in the same national table under two different spellings, counted as two separate surnames, because one of them made the request and the other did not. A count of who shares a surname in Spain is partly a count of who filed the paperwork.
📉 The point where Catalonia's count stops
Spain is counted by more than one office. Idescat, the Institut d'Estadística de Catalunya, publishes surnames for Catalonia in two columns — as a first surname and as a second surname — from data it credits as Idescat, a partir del Censo de población anual del INE. For 2025 it gives GARCIA 167,975 times as a first surname, at 20.68 per thousand, and 173,369 times as a second surname, at 21.34 per thousand. One population, two totals, depending on which slot is being counted.
Under the table Idescat prints its own floor: Sólo se muestran los apellidos de frecuencia igual o superior a 4 — surnames held by three people or fewer are not shown at all. The rarest surnames in Catalonia are exactly the ones the table will not print, which is worth knowing before trusting any list of rare Spanish names. More on how this site handles that in Data Sources.
⭐ Rare Facts About Spain
Where the Spanish numbers on this page come from
Population: INE's Estadística Continua de Población — 49,801,559 residents on 1 July 2026, published 6 August 2026. Surname and given-name counts: INE's Apellidos y nombres más frecuentes, drawn from the Censo de Población and the Estadística de nacimientos. Catalonia figures: Idescat. Name rules: Ley 20/2011 at the BOE. The eye colour, hair colour, blood type and height figures above come from none of these Spanish sources — they are estimates, and Data Sources says where they come from and how far to trust them. Last checked September 2026.