Regions with the highest expected life span are the Spanish capital Madrid with 86.1 years, followed by the northern Italian region of Trento and the Åland Islands between Sweden and Finland with 85.1 years.
On the other hand, Bulgaria’s northwestern region had the lowest life expectancy, at 73.9 years, followed by Hungary’s northeastern counties and the EU’s outermost region, the French Mayotte islands off the coast of Madagascar, at 74.9 years.
But several other regions in Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary, as well as Latvia, also lag behind Southern Europeans in life expectancy by almost 10 years — perhaps making a case for the Mediterranean diet, even if some say it’s dead.
Another glaring divide seems to be a gender gap, with women expected to live 5 years longer than men.
The gender gap appears to be widest in the Baltic States, as women in Latvia are expected to live 10 years longer than men, followed by Lithuania with 9 years and Estonia with 8.8 years. The smallest gender gap is in the Netherlands, at 3 years.