Los límites entre el turismo y la migración residencial. Una tipología

New lifestyles some related to tourism phenomena and others to migration trends, can be identified behind the international mobility process of retirees who move from northern European countries to Mediterranean areas. Host societies require the definition of criteria that will allow them to classify these people either as tourists or as immigrants, since the funding and management of their resources depend on it. In this article we propose a typology based on a survey of 872 European citizens in the province of Alicante. Both the fact of being registered in the local census and whether the dwelling is bought or rented by those European citizens turn out to be the explanatory variables of the relationship between long-stay tourism and residential migration.