Spain's LGBTQ+ Hate Crime Surge: More Than Half Report Abuse in the Past Year
A new FELGTB+ report shows hate crimes, harassment, and physical assaults against LGBTQ+ people in Spain have more than doubled since 2024 — with transgender people bearing the worst of it.
For years, Spain has occupied a kind of mythic spot on the global LGBTQ+ map — one of the earliest European countries to legalize same-sex marriage, an early adopter of self-ID for trans people, a steady presence near the top of ILGA-Europe’s annual rights rankings. The Spain in the tourist brochures is a country where Chueca hums in the summer, where Madrid Pride is one of Europe’s biggest, where the state protects you on paper and, mostly, in practice.
A new report from FELGTB+, Spain’s largest LGBTQ+ federation, complicates that picture considerably. According to data released this month, more than half of LGBTQ+ people in Spain — 54 percent — reported experiencing some form of abuse in the past year. Harassment has jumped from 20 percent in 2024 to 36 percent in 2026. Physical assaults have tripled: from 7 percent two years ago to 22 percent today. And among transgender people specifically, fully half reported being physically attacked over the last 12 months.
Sexual orientation and gender identity now account for 35 percent of all hate crimes recorded in Spain, up from 17 percent in 2024. That makes anti-LGBTQ+ hate the second most common motivation for hate crime in the country, behind only racism and xenophobia.
What changed
The legal framework has not regressed. Spain’s 2023 trans law remains on the books. The 2022 equality law still requires companies with more than 50 employees to implement anti-discrimination protocols, and those rules took full effect this month. On paper, Spain is still one of the most protective jurisdictions in Europe.
What has changed is the political and social climate around those laws. The rise of Vox — the far-right party that broke into Spain’s political mainstream in the late 2010s — has normalized a set of talking points about trans people, about “gender ideology,” and about the Socialist-Sumar government’s record on LGBTQ+ rights that were unthinkable in Spanish politics a decade ago. Vox has made explicit opposition to the 2023 trans law a central plank of its platform. Regional governments that include Vox in coalition — Valencia, Extremadura, Aragón, Castilla y León — have moved to weaken or repeal LGBTQ+ protections at the autonomous-community level.
The federation’s report does not blame any single party. But the trajectory is clear: hate crime figures across Europe have tracked almost in lockstep with the mainstreaming of far-right rhetoric, and Spain — after years of appearing immune — is now following the same pattern as France, Italy, and Germany.
Transgender people bear the worst of it
The numbers for trans Spaniards are especially stark. One in two trans respondents reported a physical assault in the past year. The figure is high enough that it challenges the framing of Spain as a safe country for trans people — a framing that has underpinned a steady stream of trans migrants from less hospitable EU member states, particularly Italy, Hungary, and Poland, choosing Spain as their legal home.
FELGTB+ notes that trans visibility has increased significantly since the 2023 self-ID law took effect, but so has targeting. The more trans people are publicly identifiable — through legal documents, healthcare, social services — the more exposed they are to people looking to harm them. This is a familiar pattern: visibility without corresponding cultural acceptance tends to produce a backlash, and the data in Spain suggest that backlash is underway.
Around 6 million people, and rising numbers affected
Roughly 12 percent of Spain’s population identifies as LGBTQ+, a figure higher than most European estimates and consistent with younger generations coming out in significantly larger numbers than their parents. That’s about six million people. If a third are reporting harassment and a fifth are reporting assault, the scale of what’s happening is not a statistical curiosity — it’s a public-safety issue affecting a significant fraction of the Spanish population.
Overall hate crimes in Spain rose 30 percent between 2020 and 2024, according to interior ministry data. The FELGTB+ figures suggest that trend has accelerated, not plateaued.
What the federation is asking for
FELGTB+ is calling for a national pact against hate speech — a cross-party agreement, modeled on similar pacts on gender violence and terrorism, that would commit all major parties to refrain from stigmatizing LGBTQ+ people in political discourse. They’re also asking for stronger enforcement of existing hate crime laws, better training for police and prosecutors, and serious investment in victim support services.
Whether any of that is politically achievable in a climate where Vox is actively campaigning on the opposite platform is an open question. The Sánchez government has expressed support, but with a fragile coalition and regional governments moving in the opposite direction, the gap between federal intent and local reality is widening.
The bigger picture
Spain is not the worst country in Europe for LGBTQ+ people — not by a long stretch. It remains well ahead of Italy, Greece, Poland, Hungary, and most of the Balkans on formal rights. But the FELGTB+ numbers are a reminder that legal equality and lived safety are not the same thing. A country can pass excellent laws and still become meaningfully less safe for the people those laws were written to protect, if the political and cultural environment turns against them.
For the LGBTQ+ Spaniards now reporting harassment and violence at rates that would have seemed unthinkable five years ago, the question is not whether Spain is still a progressive country on paper. It’s whether the paper still matches the street.
Sources: FELGTB+ report (April 2026); The Olive Press reporting; Spanish Ministry of the Interior hate crime statistics; ILGA-Europe Annual Review 2026.
