Spain's lenders borrowed 192.97 billion euros ($209 billion) from the ECB in last month of 2022, down from 273.7 billion euros in November, Bank of Spain data showed on Friday.
It was the lowest amount borrowed by Spanish lenders since June 2020, when they took out around 196 billion euros, according to the Spanish central bank.
Euro zone banks have started repaying early those multi-year loans from the ECB as inflation has been surging and the central bank raised borrowing costs on these loans in November, hoping banks would rather hand back the funds than pay higher interest.
On Friday, the ECB said euro zone banks were set to repay early another 62.7 billion euros, bringing the total reduction of outstanding loans to nearly 860 billion euros in just a few months.
Banks had until recently been sitting on 2.1 trillion euros worth of cash from the ECB's TLTROs, launched to encourage lending and spur economic activity when the euro zone was threatened with deflation.
Citi recently estimated that Italian and Spanish banks have been benefiting the most from the cash pumped into the financial system.
In August 2012, Spanish banks had taken an all-time high of 411 billion euros from the ECB, when the country's financial turmoil reached a peak and weak lenders were granted a 41.3 billion euro aid package from the European Union that summer.
(Reporting by Jesús Aguado; additional reporting by Balazs Koranyi; Editing by David Goodman and Tomasz Janowski)
