Barcelona, stop short rentals to curb tourism excesses

Barcelona says stop to B&Bs: in fact, the city’s mayor Jaume Collboni has announced that the more than 10,000 short-term rental licenses will not be renewed when they expire to curb the effects of excess tourism. A drastic measure but far off in time, as the deadlines are November 2028, time for homeowners to adjust but also plenty of time to see the announced outlook changed.

In 2022, according to data from the Barcelona Tourism Observatory, there were 2million and 360 thousand tourists using short-rental accommodations, an increase of as much as 87 percent from the year before. Catalonia is the favorite destination for foreigners in Spain with more than 18 million visitors, 21% more than the previous year. The effect generated by these numbers that the mayor wants to curb is that of therise in housing costs for both buying and selling (increased by 40 percent in 10 years) and rents (increased by 70 percent in the same period): those who are residents, the mayor pointed out, even though they are working cannot find housing because of the increasingly high prices and are forced to move out of town. His intention is to put these 10,000 houses back on the market by encouraging prices to fall and curb depopulation.

Licenses to open this non-hotel hospitality business had been suspended since 2014, and the previous mayor in Jaume Collboni had approved an urban plan that allowed new hotels to open only in outlying areas. But that was clearly not enough, and now to this measure the mayor also plans to limit the docking of cruise ships: there are 3.5 million cruise passengers who disembark to visit Barcelona increasing each year. The resounding decision immediately triggered political and business reactions with the announcement of an appeal to the Spanish Constitutional Court.

The measure announced by the mayor at a press conference will have to be approved by the city council, and, El Pais explains, the notice on tourist apartments responds to the decree of the Generalitat (the regional government) that calls on Catalan municipalities to draw up, within five years (from December 2023), an urban plan that establishes how many tourist apartments they accept to have. And on the possibility of having to compensate owners of tourist apartments who will lose their licenses, he recalled that the Generalitat decree stipulates that the five-year period until business permits expire will serve as compensation. In addition, the decree also stipulates that a few more license owners who have invested in improving apartments can apply for an extension of another five years, starting in 2028, which would push back some closures to 10 years earlier.

The Urban Plan will be revised by eliminating the category of “tourist apartments” altogether. The Barcelona municipality will then not determine how many licenses it allows in the city but will extinguish all of them. That of the Catalan city is the latest in a series of expressions of unease with tourism that are being raised from many quarters in Spain, leading the way in Europe on a situation common to all European capitals and cities of art.

Image: view of Barcelona. Photo: Logan Armstrong

Barcelona, stop short rentals to curb tourism excesses

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