Erfurt (dpa/th) – The two major cities in Thuringia, Erfurt and Jena, are home to around a sixth of the people in the state. A total of around 325,000 people lived in the two cities at the end of 2020, as the Thuringian State Office for Statistics announced on Tuesday. 213,692 Thuringians lived in Erfurt, significantly more than in Jena (110,731). That is around 15.3 percent of the total population of the Free State.
This puts the rather rural federal state in the lower third compared to the other federal states in Germany. On a national average, 32 percent of the population lived in large cities at the end of 2020. Without the city states of Berlin, Hamburg and Bremen, the rate is reduced to 26.5 percent.
According to the Federal Institute for Research on Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development, large cities are cities in which at least 100,000 people live. At the end of 2020, there were a total of 80 cities in Germany that had this number of inhabitants.
At the turn of the millennium, Gera was one of the two major cities in the state alongside Erfurt. The number of inhabitants was similar to that of Erfurt and Jena today. But a lot has happened: In the past two decades, Jena and Erfurt have had the highest growth with a plus of 10.1 and 6.5. Weimar also gained significantly (plus 4.3 percent).
The city of Suhl recorded the highest loss with a minus of 24.2 percent of the population. The cities of Gera (minus 18.4 percent) and Eisenach (minus 5.6 percent) also have a lower population than in 2000. Overall, the Thuringian population shrank from 2,431,255 to 2,120,237 in this period – that’s a minus 12.8 percent.
