COPY LINK

For members

TOURISM

Why Madrid is struggling with its explosion of illegal holiday lets

If you’re going on a trip to Madrid and have booked a tourist apartment rather than a hotel, chances are that you’ve reserved one of the circa 25,000 illegal holiday lets in the Spanish capital. In fact, only one in 25 is reportedly legit.

Published: 28 November 2023 10:06 CET

Why Madrid is struggling with its explosion of illegal holiday lets

Only 1 in 25 tourist apartments in Madrid are legal. Photo: Jhosef Anderson Cardich Palma / Unsplash

There are tens of thousands of tourist apartments in Madrid available through platforms such as Airbnb and Booking, and yet recent findings show that barely five percent have a municipal tourist licence in order to operate legally.

Only 628 tourist apartments with this licence exist throughout the city, Madrid’s Delegate of Urban Planning, Environment and Mobility Borja Carabante has said.

According to the Inside Airbnb platform, there were 24,828 tourist apartments in the city in 2023. Some estimates suggest that only four percent or one in 25 of them are legal, but the ratio could be even starker.

Knowing the true number of tourist apartments in Madrid may not be possible. Other data from 2023 suggests that they continue to proliferate, with between 4,500 and 5,000 more short-term lets advertised this year.

The fact that these holiday lets in Spain’s capital don’t meet the legal standards doesn’t prevent owners from advertising them on Airbnb or similar, even though the homestays giant states that owners should have a tourist licence if required.

Complaints about tourist apartments in Madrid have grown by almost 70 percent in the last year, going from 282 between January and September 2022 to 482 registered in the same period of 2023, according to the latest management report of Madrid City Hall’s Urban Activities Agency.

What is the current law on tourist apartments in Madrid?

In March 2019, one month before the Madrid mayoral elections, former mayor Manuela Carmena approved a special Accommodation Plan to regulate tourist accommodation in the city.

The new rule established among other requirements that tourist apartments should have an independent entrance from the rest of the neighbours. This would affect 95 percent of holiday lets in the city according to her calculations. The rule was appealed by the sector, but the courts ended up agreeing with the City Council in 2021.

What is being done about Madrid’s illegal holiday lets problem?

Now, the current mayor José Luis Martínez-Almeida believes that these rules are not enough and plans to introduce new measures in 2024 to try and curb the tourist apartment problem, without giving any proper details yet.

“We all know that there are thousands of homes that are providing this service. Therefore, the current regulations are not sufficient and are not adjusting to the legality of the city, he said. “We intend to establish a plan that allows us to face the challenge of how to legalise apartments without a licence,” Almeida added.

Tourists cross Plaza Mayor square in central Madrid, a hotspot of holiday lets. (Photo by OSCAR DEL POZO / AFP)

Some urban experts and neighbourhood groups are against Almeida’s plans, arguing that the old law is sufficient. “The problem is not the current law but the lack of will to enforce it,” the neighbourhood associations of Madrid Centro told El Diario.

“If it has not worked, it is simply because his government team has not wanted it to work, evading their responsibility for surveillance and control, preferring to look the other way while the problem spreads,” they add.

Others also blame the lack of inspectors available to check on these apartments.

What are the penalties in place?

To offer a property for tourist use in the city, two legal requirements are necessary – a responsible declaration issued by the Community of Madrid and a licence from the City Council.

Failure to comply with these rules may result in a fine of up to €3,000 if it is minor, or €300,000 if it is very serious, according to regional law 11/1999 on Tourism Regulation.

How can authorities shut down illegal tourist apartments?

In order for Madrid City Council to close a tourist apartment, they must first prove that it doesn’t have a licence. Once they have done this, they can order them to stop offering accommodation to tourists, giving them a deadline of three months in which to take down the ads and stop operating.

Inspectors must in theory return to the offending apartment to see if it continues to be rented to tourists or not. If they are still there there will be another three-month period that will end with a fine of €1,000. If they still don’t comply, a second fine is issued, this time for €2,000. And if the situation persists, a third penalty of €3,000 will arrive.

For each sanction, a minimum of three months of processing is necessary, which puts the process at a full year, without counting the time it took for the inspections to be carried out, the appeals or possible suspensions.

This means that the process of closing an illegal tourist apartment could take at least 18 months, but the reality is that it usually takes much longer.

Last year, council inspections only managed to close 12 illegal apartments across the city.

How does this compare to other regions in Spain with a tourist apartment problem?

Conversely in Catalonia, the Catalan Tourism Law 13/2002 states that you can be fined between €60,000 and €600,001 for letting tourist apartments without a licence, and temporarily or permanently shut them down.

In 2021 however, Catalan authorities said they would decrease the penalties for some first-time offenders who owned just one tourist let and if the flat used was their usual residence at the time of the infraction.

Why does the issue have to be addressed in Madrid?

Spain’s capital has the highest number of Airbnb properties of all cities in Spain – growing at a rate of 41 units a day – a contributing factor to spiralling rents for Madrileños and the sense that their residential buildings have become hotels, all because of the increased profit short-term holiday lets can bring property owners compared to having long-term tenants.

Rents have gone up by as much 25 percent in a year in central neighbourhoods such as Sol, Estrella and Almagro. In districts such as Chamartín, Chamberí and Salamanca it’s now the standard for tenants to pay above €20/sqm, meaning that a 100sqm apartment is going for over €2,000 a month.

Esto no son pisos en alquiler en Madrid… Son HABITACIONES EN PISOS COMPARTIDOS. Esto no tiene ningún sentido. Hay gente FORRÁNDOSE a costa de sangrar a los demás. pic.twitter.com/o0MUyV0rXR

— Dramario🎢 (@dramario_) November 26, 2023

Even renting a room in a shared flat can easily cost over €800 in parts of Madrid that aren’t truly central, as the tweet above reflects.

Madrid is in fact suffering the same consequences of tourists being favoured over locals as countless other cities around the world, and in Spain itself, with Málaga standing out as the latest city which has become ‘too popular’ for its own good.

READ MORE:

Member comments

Become a Member to leave a comment.

Good tourist, bad tourist: How to travel responsibly in Spain

Barcelona resident David Mar doesn’t travel, but he thinks about tourism every day.

Tourists crowd the buses — essential for movement in a hilly neighbourhood like his. They leave trash for residents to discover in the morning. They shout and sing at night and wander drunkenly through the residential streets, ambling into backyards and pulling down laundry on clotheslines.

“It’s a disturbance that goes from when you wake up in the morning until you go to bed at night,” he told The Local Spain. “You don’t feel welcome in your own neighbourhood.”

Mar lives in Turó de la Rovira, on a 262-metre hill that towers over the city.

A viewpoint atop the hill called Los Bunkers de Carmel has gone viral on TikTok for its sweeping city views, bringing hordes of tourists to come drink wine, watch the sunset, and sometimes party into the early morning.

But for the residents of the surrounding Carmel neighbourhood — among Barcelona’s poorest — the consequences of this tourist explosion have been severe.

Mar was involved in a physical altercation with a group of four Australians, after he confronted them for tipping over parked motorcycles.

And last June a 76 year-old man was assaulted by a group of seven English-speaking youths after he tried to stop them from jumping a fence that had been put up around the Bunkers.

Such events are commonplace in Carmel, Mar says, with the post-pandemic massification of tourism provoking an unstoppable flow of Instagram-like-hungry travellers, fuelled by an increasingly lucrative industry whose interests often conflict with those of local residents.

“It collides directly with the most basic rights of those who live here,” Mar says. “Our right to housing, our right to transportation, our right to rest peacefully.”

With some 1.3 billion international arrivals globally in 2023, more people are travelling for pleasure than ever before in human history.

But as excessive crowds stress infrastructure and locals find themselves pushed out of their own communities, prevailing attitudes towards travel must be reconsidered if global tourism is to continue growing sustainably.

“Tourism isn’t a right, it’s a decision that you make,” Mar says. “And if you do it, you must be aware of the consequences it can generate.”

A couple uses a selfie stick to take a picture next to a banner warning tourists on drought alert in Catalonia, near Sagrada Familia basilica in Barcelona. (Photo by PAU BARRENA / AFP)

Empathy abroad

Bartolomé Deyá Tortella, a researcher and the Dean of Tourism Faculty at the University of the Balearic Islands, says few tourists consider such consequences.

Instead, they embrace their inner hedonist and focus their vacation time on maximum pleasure for minimum price. This mindset might cause a tourist to forget their values and do things they’d never do at home.

“We all become capitalists when we practice tourism,” Deyá told The Local. “You think, ‘I paid for this, I’m on vacation, I’m having my moment of pleasure, I worked the whole year for it.”

Such thinking could explain why someone might respect quiet hours in their own neighbourhoods, but shout drunkenly in the streets late at night while on vacation.

Or why on a trip to Mallorca, where Deyá lives and works, a tourist might feel compelled to take a 10-minute shower — despite the water-stressed Mediterranean island’s near-drought conditions — while residents routinely shower in a minute or less.

Failure to consider saving water or respecting quiet hours comes down to lack of empathy, Deyá says, and our tendency to other the people whose communities we enter while traveling.

“Act as if you were in your own home,” he says. “If when you’re in your own city you don’t shout in the street because you know your neighbours are sleeping, why do it when you’re traveling?”

Social sustainability

Much has been said about environmental sustainability, but it’s easy to forget the social impacts of travel; how our interactions with local people and economies can change that society.

“When every one of us travels, it implies that the places where we came from are transformed, the places we pass through are transformed, and obviously, so are the places we arrive to,” Manuel de la Calle Vaquero, Vicedean of the Faculty of Commerce and Tourism at Complutense University of Madrid, told The Local Spain.

With this in mind, the most sustainable way to travel is by using one’s presence to positively impact the local community.

Or in other words, to leave a place better than you found it.

“When you jump on a plane, it’s important to make sure that trip counts for something positive,” says Justin Francis, founder of Responsible Travel, a holiday company that collaborates with local partners to plan socially and environmentally sustainable vacations.

“I advise people to fly less, keep short trips flight-free – and, when you do fly, stay in a place longer and travel in a way that does as much good as possible,” Francis says.

Anti-gentrification banners addressing were already hanging from balconies in Barcelona back in 2017. (Photo by Josep LAGO / AFP)

Neighbourhood colonisers

One of the most significant ways in which tourism can alter the social landscape is through accommodation.

Not long ago, tourists and residents in Spain did not typically mix, with tourists sticking near their hotels, rarely straying into residential zones, Deyá says.

But today’s tourist has matured, and now expects novelty; an “authentic” experience that they can convince themselves distinguishes them from the thousands of other tourists expecting the same.

Nowadays they live among residents, in apartments instead of hotels, utilizing short-term rental platforms like Airbnb, which has led to the dissolution of boundaries between a city’s tourist and local zones.

Vaquero describes this new kind of tourist as the “anti-tourism” tourist, in the sense that they’re not interested in the sort of tourism promoted by governments and travel agencies, but instead consider themselves the explorers of new “authentic” destinations outside the typical tourist sphere.

“The one who wants to leave the traditional tourist circuit and supposedly goes looking for ‘authentic’ neighbourhoods — that tourist is obviously the coloniser,” Vaquero says.

The boom in short-term vacation rentals has led to what’s been dubbed the “Airbnb effect” in neighbourhoods worldwide, in which residents are slowly replaced by a constant flux of tourists. For landlords, vacation rentals can be far more lucrative than renting to residents, thus incentivizing them to evict long-term tenants in order to list their properties on Airbnb.

This is exactly what happened to Emanuele Dal Carlo. His landlord didn’t want to renew the lease on his small Venice apartment because they could make more renting it out on Airbnb. Like so many other Venetians, Dal Carlo had to move to the mainland.

To better understand the cultural erosion he saw happening to his city as a result of Airbnb, Dal Carlo enlisted the help of researchers to conduct a study, through which he discovered only 2,000 of the 3,300 Airbnbs in the city were registered with the government, and many were rented by foreign hosts with zero connection to Venice.

This means that much of the money tourists spend on accommodation never lands on the ground, thus eliminating any potential benefit to the local economy.

“What’s wrong is that the money available from tourism is not fairly distributed between workers and residents,” Dal Carlo says.

Dal Carlo now runs Fairbnb, an ethical Airbnb alternative which promotes “community-powered tourism.” Hosts are certified local, and the platform fees are put directly towards a social project in the local community, like food redistribution or sustainable energy initiatives.

As a tourist, the best way to avoid feeding the problem is by avoiding short term rentals when possible, Dal Carlo says, and instead booking accommodations with local businesses, like small independent hotels or traditional bed and breakfasts.

And if you absolutely must use Airbnb, Dal Carlo suggests booking with local hosts.

“If you’re traveling to Venice and your host is from Finland, ask yourself some questions,” he says.

An elderly local man on crutches waits to cross as a group of tourists using Segways squeeze by and into the narrow streets of Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter. (Photo by PAU BARRENA / AFP)

Whose fault?

In Spain, anti-tourism protests have crescendoed in recent weeks. The travel industry, it seems, has grown beyond its means, and locals are taking note.

To some degree, the problem can be traced to poor planning on the part of local governments and the unchecked expansion of algorithmic platforms like Airbnb.

Deyá points out that many government entities in Spain have welcomed tourist money, pursuing marketing campaigns without investing in adequate preparation.

“Tourism is the typical sector where many governments say, ‘ok, let’s leave it, because this works. Don’t touch it,’” Deyá says. “But there’s been no planning, there’s been no strategy.”

Back in Barcelona, the city’s public transport authority was involved in the promotion of the Carmel bunkers through its Bus Turistic webpage, encouraging tourists to come see the “spectacular views over Barcelona.”

The promotion was taken down on April 16th after continued anti-tourism protests from the Turó de la Rovira neighbourhood council, of which Mar is a member.

But as is the case with so many industries in a crowded world full of contradictions, the individual cannot be absolved of all responsibility, as one’s choice to participate in harmful systems enables their continuation.

No law or tourist tax will compel tourists to act with empathy, and the absence of such regulations should not be used to justify one’s bad behaviour abroad.

“The problem is that we’re hypocrites, and we think that it’s someone else who has to solve the problem,” Deyá says.

Mar, who’s never been much of a traveller himself, is no longer interested in traveling internationally after seeing what tourism has done to his city.

“So much of my city has become inhospitable for residents,” he says. “Because we’re truly suffering from it here in Barcelona, the concept of tourism disgusts me more and more.”

READ ALSO:

SHOW COMMENTS

Url copied to clipboard!