The Reverse Flow: How Latin American Money Came to Own Part of Spain

For thirty years the money flowed from Madrid to Mexico City, São Paulo and Buenos Aires; over the past fifteen it has been flowing back. Latin American families, banks and industrial groups now own some of Spain’s largest construction, property, food and banking businesses, and the wealthiest Mexicans, Venezuelans and Argentines have made Madrid the place where they keep their apartments, their private banks and, increasingly, their holding companies. This case study identifies the confirmed holdings, quantifies the flow and explains why Spain rather than London or Miami became the destination. It is part of the Spain Company Stories hub.

How large is the reverse flow?

Large enough that Spain is the second most important destination for Latin American investment in the world after the United States. The accumulated stock of €66.8bn has more than doubled since 2010, and between 2020 and 2024 Latin American companies announced 360 greenfield projects in Spain, more than in the rest of the European Union combined.

The composition is skewed toward Mexico, which supplies half the stock, and toward a handful of very large transactions: Slim’s control of FCC, Sigma’s purchase of Campofrío, the Escotet family’s acquisition of NCG Banco (now Abanca) in 2013, and a series of real estate and hotel purchases in Madrid. Annual flows are lumpier than the stock suggests; 2024 inflows were around €2.2bn, down 5% on 2023, after several years in which single deals moved the total.

The sectoral spread of recent projects — 82 in software and ICT, 45 in financial services, 34 in food and beverages, 25 in textiles — shows that beyond the billionaires there is a layer of mid-sized Latin American companies using Spain as their European headquarters. The Banco de España estimates Latin American capital at roughly 8% of Spain’s inbound FDI stock on its own measure, in the same range as ICEX’s 9.4%.

What does Carlos Slim own in Spain?

About 85% of FCC, the construction, environmental services and water group, and through FCC and his own vehicles a controlling position in the property company Realia and a stake in the housebuilder Metrovacesa. Slim is by a wide margin the largest Latin American owner of Spanish corporate assets.

Slim entered FCC in 2014 with a €650m capital increase when the company was close to insolvency under Esther Koplowitz, took majority control in 2016 and has bought steadily since, reaching over 80% by 2023. Under his ownership FCC has been reorganised around three businesses — environmental services, water and construction — and partially monetised: in October 2025 FCC sold a further 25% of its environmental division to Canada’s CPPIB for €1bn, retaining 50.1%. In December 2024 FCC spun off its cement and real estate businesses, including Realia and the Metrovacesa stake, into a separately listed vehicle, Inmocemento, in which Slim holds the same controlling position.

The property holdings were built through FCC and Slim’s Inversora Carso. FCC and Slim took control of Realia between 2015 and 2017, and Slim added further stakes, including 15% bought from the fund Polygon. In 2022 FCC launched an offer for 24% of Metrovacesa at €7.80 per share, worth up to €284m, ending with a holding of roughly a fifth of the company alongside Santander and BBVA, the banks that had created Metrovacesa from their crisis-era land. The strategy is the one Slim has applied in Mexico and the United States: buy distressed control positions in asset-heavy businesses when the local capital markets cannot.

Who are the other Mexican investors with confirmed holdings?

Carlos Fernández González, David Martínez, and the industrial groups Sigma, Bimbo and Cemex. Each holding is disclosed in Spanish regulatory filings or company accounts, which is the standard applied here; several widely reported “Mexican stakes” in Spanish companies could not be confirmed and are omitted.

Fernández González, former chief executive of the brewer Grupo Modelo, holds 12.76% of Inmobiliaria Colonial, the Madrid- and Paris-focused office landlord, through his Finaccess vehicles, making him the second-largest shareholder after CriteriaCaixa. He also sits on Colonial’s board. Martínez, founder of the New York-based fund Fintech Advisory, joined Banco Sabadell’s board in 2013 and built a stake of around 3.5% at prices below €1 per share; he was the only Sabadell director to publicly accept BBVA’s 2025 offer, breaking with chairman Josep Oliu, and in July 2026 sold 1.5% for more than €120m, keeping about 2%. The offer itself, and why it failed, is analysed in our anatomy of the BBVA–Sabadell bid.

The corporate holdings are larger than the personal ones. Sigma, the food arm of Monterrey’s Alfa group, bought Campofrío outright in 2014–15 and is now investing €134m in a new plant at Utiel, Valencia, to replace one destroyed by the October 2024 floods, plus €23m at Burgos. Grupo Bimbo has owned the former Sara Lee bakery business in Spain and Portugal since 2011. Cemex has operated cement plants and ready-mix in Spain since buying Valenciana de Cementos in 1992, its first acquisition outside Mexico and the origin of its global expansion. The Mexican presence in Spanish food and building materials is, in other words, older and deeper than the more visible property purchases.

What about Venezuelan and other Latin American capital?

The largest Venezuelan holding is a bank. Juan Carlos Escotet, founder of Banesco, bought the Galician savings bank NCG Banco from Spain’s bank rescue fund in 2013 for €1bn, renamed it Abanca and has built it into one of Spain’s ten largest banks through further acquisitions, including Deutsche Bank’s Portuguese retail business and Targobank Spain. His family holds control.

Venezuelan money is otherwise concentrated in Madrid property rather than listed companies. The exodus of Venezuelan professionals and business owners after 2014 made Venezuelans one of the largest Latin American communities in the capital, and their purchases in Salamanca, Chamberí and the northern suburbs were a visible part of the market from 2015 onward. Argentine capital, at €10.6bn of stock, is the second-largest national source after Mexico, much of it in property, hotels and food, and often held through Uruguayan or Spanish holding companies, which is why Uruguay appears in the statistics at €3.6bn.

Colombian investment of around €6bn is more corporate: Colombian banks and insurers have used Madrid as a base for European operations, and Colombian software and services companies are prominent among the 82 ICT projects announced since 2020. No Colombian family investor holds a disclosed significant stake in a large Spanish listed company, and this article does not name one.

Why did Madrid’s Salamanca district become the visible symbol?

Because it is where the money lives. The Salamanca district, the nineteenth-century grid east of the Retiro park, has the highest residential prices in Spain — well above €10,000 per square metre for the best streets — and Latin American buyers have been the marginal purchaser at the top of that market since around 2015.

Bloomberg reported Mexican investment of around €700m in Spanish real estate and construction since 2020, and that more than half of a 25-unit development on Calle Padilla priced at around €3m per apartment was sold to wealthy Mexicans. The Mexican restaurateur Manuel González converted a Salamanca palace into the restaurant Abya; the developer BeGrand, led by Nicolás Carrancedo, built luxury projects in the district; Mexico’s RLH Properties owns the Villa Magna hotel on Paseo de la Castellana. Both BBVA and Santander have opened dedicated ultra-high-net-worth offices in Madrid to serve Latin American clients.

The arithmetic is the attraction. A million euros buys around 106 square metres in prime Madrid against 43 in Paris and 70 in Berlin, and a Mexican or Colombian family that has lived with peso volatility values a euro asset in a walkable, safe, Spanish-speaking city more than a Londoner does. The rise of Madrid has coincided with the broader Spanish housing shortage examined in our account of Spanish construction after the bubble, and Latin American demand is one of the reasons prime Madrid prices have outrun the rest of the country.

What did the golden visa do, and why was it abolished?

It granted Spanish residency to any non-EU citizen investing at least €500,000 in property, and it was withdrawn on 3 April 2025 because the government concluded it was inflating housing prices in Madrid, Barcelona, Málaga and the islands without bringing productive investment. Latin Americans, together with Chinese and Russian buyers, were its main users.

The scheme, created in 2013 during the property crash, issued around 15,000 residence permits over twelve years, the large majority through real estate. Its abolition removes the residency incentive but not the demand: a Mexican or Venezuelan family buying a €3m apartment in Salamanca was rarely doing so for the visa, and other routes — the non-lucrative visa, the digital nomad visa and, for many Latin Americans, the two-year citizenship path available to nationals of Ibero-American countries — remain.

The more consequential change is tax. Spain’s inpatriate regime, commonly called the Beckham law, taxes new residents at a flat 24% on Spanish income for six years and exempts most foreign income; the Madrid region additionally levies no wealth tax and has cut inheritance tax to near zero for close relatives. That combination, not the golden visa, is what moved wealthy Latin Americans to establish Spanish tax residence, and it remains in place. The 2025 abolition changed the marketing more than the economics.

What is Latibex and does it still matter?

Latibex is a market operated by BME in Madrid, created in December 1999, on which Latin American blue chips trade in euros under Spanish market rules. It was designed to be the Latin American capital market of Europe; in practice it is a small, illiquid segment that has never fulfilled that ambition.

Companies from Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and Peru with a capitalisation above €300m can list, and in its early years the market attracted the largest names — Petrobras, Vale, América Móvil, Bradesco — alongside Spanish groups’ Latin American subsidiaries. Volumes were always modest, and after the 2008 crisis most large issuers preferred New York depositary receipts. Today the market trades a shrinking list of securities and its three indices are followed mainly by Spanish retail investors.

Its failure is instructive. The financial capital of Latin America in Europe turned out to be not an exchange but an ecosystem: Spanish banks with Latin American networks, Madrid law firms with Latin American practices, family offices, real estate and the courts. BME itself is now owned by the Swiss exchange SIX, and Latin American issuers that want European capital raise it through Frankfurt, London or Euronext. The listings never came; the families did.

Why did Madrid win over Miami and London?

It did not win outright — Miami still holds far more Latin American wealth — but it won the European leg decisively, and it is gaining on Miami for families who want distance from the United States. Language, law, EU residency and the Spanish banks made it the default; Brexit and US politics made the alternatives less attractive.

The institutional infrastructure is the differentiator. Santander and BBVA between them have private banking relationships with a large share of Latin America’s wealthiest families, built over the thirty years of expansion described in our review of Spain’s Latin American investment cycle. When those families wanted a European base, the banks brought them to Madrid; the same logic that made BBVA half Mexican made Madrid partly Mexican. Spanish law firms, the Madrid Court of Arbitration and the country’s more than 70 bilateral investment treaties provide the legal layer.

The result is a two-way dependence. Spanish companies still hold more than 30% of their outward investment in Latin America; Latin American families hold nearly a tenth of the foreign capital in Spain. Each side now needs the other to be stable. The wealth flowing north is, in part, capital fleeing the same currency and political risks that pushed Telefónica and Iberdrola to sell — and the Spanish economy, which has grown faster than the eurozone since 2022 partly on the strength of foreign demand, has become one of its principal beneficiaries.

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