Barcelona will eliminate all its tourist flats by 2029, as announced this Friday by the mayor of the Catalan capital, Jaume Collboni. The city currently has more than 10,000 legally licensed tourist flats. The measure is part of the Pla Viure (in Spanish, Plan Vivir), which seeks to "generate, facilitate and free up housing supply in the market".
The Barcelona consortium has adhered, within the latest regulation of the Catalan Parliament, to the possibility of not renewing tourist flat licences from November 2028.
The aim is for the properties to become part of the residential stock in order to improve access to housing in Barcelona. "In terms of rents, in the last ten years, they have risen by 68% and in terms of buying and selling, prices have risen by 38%," Collboni pointed out.
At the press conference, Collboni also announced the modification of the previous mandate, led by Ada Colau, for private developers to allocate 30% of the flats built to subsidised housing.
The mayor appeared before the media to explain these new measures to increase Barcelona's housing stock together with the first deputy mayor for Urban Planning, Ecological Transition, Urban Services and Housing, Laia Bonet, and the fourth deputy mayor for Economy, Finance, Economic Promotion and Tourism, Jordi Valls.
The Association of Tourist Apartments of Barcelona (Apartur) stands up against Collboni.
In response to Colboni declarations, Apartur assures that the measure to ban tourist flats in Barcelona "condemns the city to poverty and unemployment" adding that "Collboni is wrong".
The association considers the decision to close 10,000 legal flats in the city to be "irresponsible and a real demagogy". "The mayor has just made a call for the city to be filled with illegal tourist flats," the association said in a statement issued after the announcement. The association points out that the latest regulations, in 2010 in Ciutat Vella, and from 2024 through the freezing of licences in the Special Urban Plan for Tourist Accommodation (Peuat), demonstrate the proliferation of businesses in the underground economy.
Furthermore, Apartur recalls that tourist housing in the city accounts for 0.77% of the total residential stock and points out that in this announcement it sees "a smokescreen for [the mayor's] failure in housing policies in the city".