The country of Spain is representative of land change processes in Mediterranean member states of the European Union (EU). These land change processes are often triggered by European, national and sub-national policies and include widespread land abandonment and urbanisation trends, as well as an increase in land use intensities accompanied by strong exploitation of water resources. The Mediterranean is part of the dryland ecoregion, which is particularly vulnerable to ecosystem degradation. While remote sensing data permit the characterisation of the temporal dimension of land surface processes, the syndrome-based approach aims to integrate this with information on local/regional socio-economic and physical frameworks. In this study, we incorporated two major drivers of land change, climatic boundary conditions and population density change, to understand the patterns of the assessed land cover changes.