Between 2018 and 2023, Spain built one of Europe’s most dynamic CBD consumer markets. Revenues more than doubled, specialist shops appeared in every large city, and Spanish brands started exporting to neighbouring countries. Yet in the same period, the country almost eradicated the hemp crops that should be feeding that demand. What should be a textbook case of bioeconomy and rural re-industrialisation has turned into a textbook case of policy incoherence. This article looks at that paradox from three angles: the CBD market that already exists, the collapse of domestic hemp and its climate and rural implications, and the regulatory choices now on the table – especially the new Tobacco Law – to rebuild a coherent strategy.
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The CBD economy in Spain is no longer a niche experiment but a mature consumer segment with national depth, recognisable brands and expanding international footprints. That maturity makes the disconnect between demand, domestic production and legal certainty even more visible.
A €136M ecosystem with 700 shops and 270+ brands built on legal sand
The CBD segment has moved well beyond the “early adopter” stage. According to Cannamonitor’s 2025 Spanish Cannabis Market Report, CBD revenues grew from €55M in 2018 to €136M in 2023, with the strongest expansion during the pandemic and the first wave of specialist retail.
Behind that headline number there is a dense ecosystem:
697 specialist CBD shops in 2023, stabilising at 696 shops in 2025 after churn – a sign of rotation, not disappearance.
More than 270 active brands, most created since 2017 and especially during the COVID years. Over 200 of them already bill more than €100,000 per year.
Top 20 retail chains concentrate around a third of all shops, but the market remains fragmented: the largest chain only accounts for about 6% of stores.
Patients & Dispensations in Czechia
Prescribing Doctors of Medical Cannabis in the Czech Republic
Geographically, Barcelona concentrates almost half of the sector’s declared assets, largely because it hosts major online brands like Cannactiva and pharmacy-oriented players such as Uriach (Fisiocrem). Madrid follows with roughly a fifth of assets, anchored by franchise chains like Greenery, La Tía María or The Cannabis Shop. Valencia, Málaga and Granada complete the main CBD hubs, mixing domestic brands and foreign entrants. At the productive end of the chain, field-to-brand pioneers such as Cannactiva and Bee Products have shown that vertically integrated models are possible: starting from hemp cultivation and building branded products and multichannel distribution on top. Their experience also shows how legal uncertainty and stigma can push operations abroad or force companies into defensive compliance strategies, breaking the link between Spanish land and Spanish brands even as demand grows.
CBD has also penetrated mainstream channels. Pharmacies and para-pharmacies distribute dermocosmetic and topical products that fall comfortably within EU cosmetics rules. Tobacconists and convenience stores have become a key outlet for flowers and vapes, often sold under ambiguous labels (“ornamental product”, “collector’s item”) to navigate the regulatory grey zone. Supermarkets are cautiously experimenting with CBD cosmetics and wellness products, while food supplements remain constrained by EU Novel Food rules.
Within this ecosystem, several companies illustrate that Spain is capable of building solid industrial players around CBD when the rules are at least partially clear. The Beemine Lab – pharmacy-anchored and B-Corp certified – reports around 35% revenue growth, more than €2M in sales and a presence in over 3,000 pharmacies in Spain and abroad. It is raising a €3M Series A to expand internationally and diversify its 22-SKU portfolio, including the Alivium CBD recovery line for athletes, which positions CBD squarely in the world of sports medicine and functional recovery.
Votum World combines sports, wellness and veterinary products in a portfolio of more than thirty SKUs, underpinned by R&D collaborations with public institutions; it uses CBD to connect performance, recovery and animal health in a coherent narrative.
ProfesorCBD, meanwhile, has grown from a small e-commerce into a platform with over 70 references and around €1.2M in annual turnover, expanding into pharmacies and international markets and preparing a biotech division (“Bioteacher”) that anticipates the opportunities created by Spain’s new medical-cannabis framework.
These brands – together with Cannactiva, Bee Products and others – use CBD to anchor narratives of sports science, wellness and innovation. Athlete endorsements (Andrés Iniesta with The Beemine Lab, kayaker Estefanía Fernández, surfer Bitor Garitaonandia with Votum) help normalise CBD as a recovery and performance tool rather than a “cannabis light” novelty.
Gray zone, police pressure and a restrictive turn on new cannabinoids
All of this, however, rests on legal sand. On paper, CBD is not a narcotic under EU law, and products legally made in another Member State can circulate freely within the Single Market according to the Kanavape ruling. In practice, Spain treats CBD flower almost as if it were illicit cannabis, especially since the 2021 Instruction of the Chief Anti-Drug Prosecutor on industrial hemp plantations and the Circular 3/2020 of the Tobacco Market Commissioner on “cannabis-derived” products in tobacconists.
On the ground this has produced a patchwork of enforcement. Municipal police and regional health authorities, particularly in Madrid, have carried out repeated raids on CBD shops, seizing flowers, resins and vapes labelled under 0.2–0.3% THC. Several criminal cases against shop owners have later been dismissed by the courts, which found no evidence of drug trafficking or public-health offences – but only after months of seizures, legal costs, reputational damage and, in many cases, business closure. Elsewhere, a Basque court ruling has explicitly recognised that CBD products with around 0.5% THC do not constitute an illegal narcotic, setting an important but still isolated precedent that contradicts the enforcement stance in other regions. In Barcelona, local authorities are moving towards licensing regimes and tighter oversight of CBD edibles and shops, creating yet another layer of municipal bureaucracy on top of national ambiguity.
At the same time, the central state has taken a very restrictive line on “novel cannabinoids”. Spain has recently added a broad list of hemp-derived intoxicating molecules – such as H4-CBD, HHC, THCP or THC-O – to List II of psychotropics, under EU early-warning and controlled-substance monitoring. From a public-health perspective this stance on synthetic or semi-synthetic intoxicants is defensible; from a market and narrative perspective it reinforces the confusion between non-intoxicating CBD and clearly psychoactive derivatives.
The result is a dynamic but fragile CBD industry. Demand is real and diversified; multi-million-euro brands and export-oriented projects exist; R&D and sports sponsorships bring credibility. Yet legal ambiguity and uneven enforcement create high business risk and push growth into three directions that do little for Spain’s strategic interests: increased dependence on foreign suppliers protected by EU free-movement rules; expansion of online and informal grey zones; and outright relocation of Spanish companies to more predictable jurisdictions such as the Czech Republic or Switzerland. Spain has built a CBD market – but not a stable playing field.
The collapse of domestic hemp: a missed bioeconomy opportunity
If the CBD ecosystem looks like a success story, the hemp statistics look like the opposite. The cultivated area of industrial hemp in Spain grew steadily in the 2010s, reflecting global interest in CBD and favourable laws abroad. It reached a peak of 688 hectares in 2020, mostly devoted to high-CBD flower and biomass production. Four years later, official data show only 62 hectares left – an 11-fold contraction, around a 91–92% drop.
Those hectares also hide a structural change in what and how Spain grows. Around the 2020 peak, hemp was still relatively diversified in its uses: although CBD-oriented varieties dominated, there was a meaningful mix of seed and fibre output, with roughly 1,947 tonnes harvested (about 1,557 t of seed and 390 t of fibre).
By 2024, production has shrunk to around 158 tonnes (approximately 148 t seed and 10 t fibre) and is concentrated in a few irrigated plots. About 85% of the remaining area is planted with fibre hemp and 81% is irrigated, in contrast to the pre-2000 period when rain-fed hemp covered up to 12,880 hectares. What remains today is essentially a niche, partly experimental crop maintained by a small number of growers able and willing to tolerate high regulatory risk.
This collapse is not the outcome of a normal commodity cycle; it is the result of a regulatory shock. The 2021 Prosecutor’s Instruction effectively treats hemp flower as a potential narcotic regardless of THC levels. That reading has triggered police interventions in farms, drying facilities and warehouses, pushed many growers to abandon the crop because they cannot absorb the legal and financial risk, and redirected the remaining cultivation towards low-visibility fibre projects on irrigated land. In the meantime, Spain’s CBD market consumes more than 30 tonnes of flower per year, supplied almost entirely by imports from Italy, Switzerland, Czechia and other producers. The farming income, first transformation, logistics and product-development value that could be anchored in Spanish territory is captured elsewhere.
Hemp as infrastructure: climate, soil and rural economies
From a bioeconomy perspective, this is a textbook case of self-sabotage. Few crops align as well with Spain’s structural challenges as hemp.
Agronomically, hemp grows fast, competes effectively with weeds and requires minimal pesticide use, which makes it ideal for regenerative crop rotations. Its root system improves soil structure and can help rehabilitate degraded soils, including through the uptake of certain heavy metals. Hemp also fits naturally into tobacco regions and other areas with existing drying and processing infrastructure, as shown by CETARSA’s pilot decortication lines and CTAEX’s crop-rotation projects in Extremadura, where hemp is tested as an alternative or complement to conventional crops.
From a climate standpoint, the evidence is even more compelling. A CSIC field trial in Ribadesella (Asturias) using the Fedora 17 variety measured an average CO₂ capture of 40.5 tonnes per hectare, with values between 17.6 and 89.2 t/ha – several times higher than the 9–15 t/ha range often used in European climate modelling for hemp. If those figures were fully integrated into CAP eco-schemes and national climate policy, hemp would stand out as a frontline crop for decarbonisation and soil restoration, not a marginal curiosity.
In social and economic terms, hemp works as territorial infrastructure. It anchors first-transformation jobs – decortication, fibre processing, seed pressing – in rural areas rather than in distant industrial centres. It enables short supply chains: fields, processing facilities and users (construction companies, textile mills, food and cosmetics manufacturers) can all coexist within the same region, reducing transport emissions and keeping value local. It offers a realistic way out of commodity-only agriculture in areas hit by depopulation, allowing farmers to diversify risk and improve margins.
Patients & Dispensations in Czechia
Prescribing Doctors of Medical Cannabis in the Czech Republic
Seen from this angle, hemp does not need nostalgia. Historically it clothed, fed and connected Iberian societies – from sails and ropes to paper and oils – but its relevance today is entirely functional. In a context of climate emergency and the need to replace fossil-based materials, rising construction costs and demand for low-impact insulation, and chronic rural depopulation, hemp is less a “new sector” than a multipurpose piece of infrastructure that Spain is actively dismantling while importing the same product from abroad.
Spain has the agronomic conditions, processing know-how and industrial demand to make hemp a core component of its bioeconomy strategy. What it lacks is a regulatory framework that recognises hemp as infrastructure and clearly separates it, in law and practice, from psychoactive cannabis.
From legal uncertainty to regulatory alignment
The starting point for any solution is to understand the current institutional architecture. Spain still rests on a prohibitionist backbone dating from Law 17/1967, which transposed the 1961 UN Single Convention and framed cannabis primarily as a narcotic. Instead of replacing that framework with a modern design, the country has layered sectoral patches on top: circulars from the Tobacco Market Commissioner and the Anti-Drug Prosecutor that treat CBD flower as if it were illicit cannabis; food-safety and Novel Food constraints that affect hemp-derived ingredients; and, more recently, the psychotropic classification of several semi-synthetic cannabinoids.
The only real modernisation is Royal Decree 903/2025, which creates a hospital-centred route for accessing THC and CBD medicines within the national health system. But even this limited medical-cannabis framework leaves non-narcotic CBD products and hemp flower outside any clear category. The result is a system in which operators are tolerated until a police unit or regional authority decides otherwise; courts then correct the excesses case by case, but without changing the structural rules that generated them. Spain is neither a hemp country, nor a cannabis country, nor a consistently prohibitionist one in practice. It is a high-demand, high-activity market governed by indirect, often contradictory signals.
In the rest of Europe, four main models for CBD flower and inhalables have emerged, and they effectively define the realistic options for Spain. Under a cannabis law model (Canada as the archetype), CBD is regulated inside a full cannabis act, with dedicated retail channels and strict controls; this maximises traceability but keeps distribution within a specialised network. In hemp law models (Italy, parts of the US), specific legislation allows cultivation and marketing of hemp derivatives below a THC threshold with clear separation from narcotics and lighter licences for farmers and processors. In negative regulation systems (France), CBD flower is explicitly recognised as non-narcotic, and general product rules on health, labelling and consumer protection apply without a bespoke CBD law. Finally, in tobacco law models (Switzerland, Belgium, Austria), CBD flower is regulated as a “plant-based smoking product”, subject to tobacco-like rules on traceability, packaging and sales channels, often through tobacconists.
The Tobacco Law as a realistic short-term lever
Against that backdrop, the Draft Tobacco Law 2026 is the most pragmatic near-term lever to fix at least part of the problem. Cannamonitor’s analysis of inhalable CBD estimates an unregulated market of roughly €100M and 30 tonnes per year in flowers, resins and vapes. Recognising these products as “productos vegetales para fumar” – “plant-based smoking products”, in line with Switzerland, Belgium or Austria – would give them a clear legal category and end the current practice of treating them as narcotics by interpretation.
Once brought into this framework, the state could standardise health controls: THC limits, screening for heavy metals, pesticides and microbiological contaminants, and mandatory third-party lab tests. Packaging and warning rules, plus age restrictions, could be aligned with those of tobacco without assuming tobacco-level addiction or risk. Traceability would be built into the chain, from production or import to retail, making it possible to monitor the sector properly instead of pretending it does not exist.
Crucially, Spain does not need to impose a specific excise tax on CBD equivalent to tobacco duty. Given CBD’s non-addictive profile and materially different risk, VAT-only taxation at this stage would already generate significant public revenue at current volumes, cover enforcement costs and keep the legal channel competitive against unregulated imports and informal trade. Countries that have introduced very high excise taxes on CBD have mainly succeeded in expanding the black market; Spain has no reason to repeat that mistake.
For tobacconists, such a model would not open a “new” market; it would formalise and professionalise an existing demand that is currently met through ambiguous labelling and legal grey zones. It would favour compliant operators able to invest in quality and traceability over those who operate on the margins. For hemp farmers and processors, a stable inhalable-CBD framework would reopen a domestic outlet for flower and biomass, making it viable again to invest in fields, drying capacity and first transformation instead of watching Italy, Switzerland or Czechia capture the entire value chain.
Beyond the Tobacco Law itself, a coherent CBD and hemp strategy requires Spain to align health, rural and climate policy. That starts with differentiating clearly between three categories: non-intoxicating CBD products with low risk profiles; hemp-derived intoxicants such as HHC, THCP or H4-CBD, which justify their psychotropic classification; and high-THC cannabis regulated under the medical decree. Trying to manage these three layers under a single prohibitionist reflex not only confuses consumers and operators, it also weakens enforcement and undermines public-health messaging.
From there, Spain can design light-touch, high-clarity licences for hemp cultivation, built around agronomic data, THC thresholds and traceability instead of criminal suspicion. It can use green public procurement and tax incentives to pull demand for hemp-based construction materials, textiles and bioplastics, anchoring industrial projects in regions with land, labour and existing infrastructure. And it can create one-stop administrative windows for hemp projects, reducing the bureaucratic maze that currently deters all but the most persistent investors.
Seen as a whole, CBD and hemp are not marginal issues; they are a node in a wider feedback system. Cultural normalisation through athletes, pharmacies and wellness brands reinforces demand and pushes companies towards better products. Scientific work by universities and research centres on agronomy, CO₂ capture and new applications strengthens the case for rational regulation. Rational regulation, in turn, redirects value from imports and grey zones back into rural areas, legitimate companies and the tax base. The risk is that, if Spain fails to act, that feedback loop will settle into a configuration where Spain is little more than a distribution outlet for foreign production.
Spain has the ingredients for a viable Hemp & CBD market
Spain’s CBD and hemp story is not one of absence, but of misalignment. The country has a consolidated CBD market worth over €136M, with hundreds of brands, nearly 700 shops and growing presence in pharmacies, sports and wellness. It has scientific evidence that industrial hemp is a high-impact crop for climate and soil, with CO₂ capture far above current European assumptions and strong potential in construction, textiles and nutrition. It has industrial and rural know-how, from CTAEX and CETARSA’s pilot projects to integrated brands like Cannactiva and Bee Products, which have already demonstrated field-to-brand models – and, in Bee Products’ case, how quickly that value can be forced to migrate abroad when rules turn hostile. It also has a medical-cannabis decree that, while restrictive, signals a new institutional phase.
What Spain lacks is a coherent CBD and hemp strategy.
Without it, the trajectory is clear: more imports, more police operations against low-risk products, more relocation of Spanish companies to Prague or Zurich, more missed opportunities for rural jobs and climate-positive materials. With it, the picture changes: inhalable CBD formalised under the Tobacco Law as a regulated plant-based smoking product; industrial hemp recognised and rewarded as strategic bioeconomy infrastructure; clear separation between CBD, intoxicating derivatives and high-THC cannabis; and a predictable framework in which Spanish farmers, processors and brands can invest for the long term.
Spain has already proven that demand exists and that it can produce serious CBD companies. The question for the coming years is whether it will continue to outsource the supply and the value, or finally align regulation, cultivation and industrial policy so that the CBD boom translates into resilient rural economies, better public-health outcomes and tangible climate gains. That decision will determine whether hemp remains a legal headache at the margins of the cannabis debate – or becomes one of the most useful tools in Spain’s bioindustrial future.