Tourists leaving and entering the property on Ample street in Barcelona where there are illegal tourist accommodations and whose owner has been fined by the City Council with 420,000 euros, this Wednesday. Gianluca Battista
Traffic jam of tourists with suitcases on the pavement, in front of number 24 Ample street, in the Gothic quarter, the heart of tourism in Barcelona. And very similar vaudeville on the third floor of the building, where customers leave through one door, and others enter through the next door. There is no elevator, and on the staircase others drag luggage. It's 11:00 a.m. on Wednesday, a day after Barcelona City Council announced this week a record fine of 420,000 euros to the owner of the building, where most of the homes are illegal flats or tourist hostels. In addition to the sanction, the City Council has initiated orders to cease activities. But, for now, the offer is still active and this week it was announced on tourism portals such as Booking or Rumbo. "Are they really illegal? But will we be able to get in? We have paid for the reservation," says Fernando on the street, who has just arrived from Mexico with two other people, all middle-aged. A surprise that in a few minutes another 21 clients (from France, Italy, northern European countries and Asia) will get when this newspaper explains to them the announcement of the consistory to fine and close the flats. The case of Calle Ample, a regal building – a staircase and four floors of more than 500 square metres – illustrates how hard it is to investigate, fine and close illegal tourist flats in Spain: the City Council has taken six years.
Barcelona, with former mayor Xavier Trias, already in 2014 froze the granting of new licenses for new legal tourist flats. And it is also a pioneer and leads the battle against illegal supply, which causes problems of coexistence, takes housing off the market for neighbors and shoots up prices. A tension that all tourist cities in Spain are experiencing and against which other City Councils or communities are also fighting, with more modest results.
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Record fine for the owner of a building in Barcelona that rented flats to tourists without a licence: 420,000 euros
The shock plan against clandestine supply in Barcelona began in 2016, with former mayor Ada Colau, and the government of her successor (and former partner), Jaume Collboni, maintains that it will be "inflexible and forceful in the face of owners and organised groups that do business with illegal tourist flats". Since 2016 "with proactive and constant control", municipal sources point out, "it has gone from about 6,000 tourist homes to 'a very low figure' thanks to the inspection and sanctioning activity". In seven years, almost 70,00 advertisements have been analysed, 22,728 disciplinary proceedings have been opened (there may be several for the same location) which have resulted in 9,679 cease and desist orders and 10,500 fine proceedings. In addition, "3,473 flats have been recovered for the use of habitual residence where there was tourist activity without a licence".
Behind these numbers there is a centralized team of 30 web page crawlers, 27 inspectors who investigate from the portals and at street level, and six lawyers, the same sources highlight. Every month, they detect about 500 advertisements for entire flats or rooms that are offered to tourists without a licence. In addition to initiating the sanction and closure procedure, they require the portals to remove the advertisements of flats without a license, a request that in the case of Airbnb was stressed and Colau went so far as to fine the portal with 600,000 euros, a case still in court. Before the shock plan, the illegals were taken care of by the districts, which did what they could with far fewer means, the team of inspectors recalls.
Bustle of tourists with suitcases in the building in the Gothic quarter of Barcelona where there is accommodation for illegal visitors and that the City Council is trying to close, this Wednesday. Gianluca Battista
One of the people in charge of the team explains that the difficulty of closing illegal tourist flats lies in the fact that the activity is carried out in a home, a space protected by law and in which the compatibility of uses is allowed. "If a nightclub breaks the rule and you close it, it can't reopen like anything else. On the other hand, if you seal a tourist apartment, it can become a home again, because a domicile is a constitutionally recognized right," illustrates the municipal technician. In fact, in the illegal offer that has been closed, the City Council carries out six-monthly inspections in the following three years.
The shock plan, with a first battery of fines of 60,000 euros, scared away "the incredible number of individuals in Barcelona who rented their flats to tourists". Now the war is different. Another level. "The illegals who remain are a minority of professionals who dedicate themselves to this: they manage them through different companies or brands to mislead, they change the photos of the ads, the hosts...", explain the same sources. In the case of Ample Street, the owner (with whom this newspaper has tried to contact without success), showed the City Council legal rental contracts and assured that it was the tenants who re-rented to neighbors. In the building there are tourist flats, each with its own kitchen, but also floors that are hostels, such as the third one. "We were expecting a hotel, not an apartment," said Nadia, a client from Sitges in Barcelona who stayed with six friends from Montpelier.
Young customers leaving the hostel that is advertised as Blue Hostel or Blue Gòtic, in a building in the neighbourhood where there is this and other tourist flats without a license, this Wednesday. Gianluca Battista
Blue Hostel or Blue Gótico are some of the names that can be found on the internet of the establishment. And in a nearby store, the owners, accustomed to serving customers who can't find it, because there is no sign on the street, explain that it has had other names, such as 4 Fun or Serenity. Tourists display a message from their reservation: "The entrance is through a large door. To enter, call the intercom 3º 2ª or 3º 3ª. Once inside the building, you can go directly to the third floor."
"The inspection activity brings out a lot of data and evidence, but the processing is very complex. We have to make very complete files to prove everything and for the judge to validate our performance, sometimes they have not accepted cases that we have been working on for years," they indicate in the shock plan team. In each case, two lines are opened. One to stop the activity, restitution: notice to the owner, cease and desist orders, until sealing and closing is achieved. And another, sanctions to prevent reoffending, which usually end up in court when the owners are professionals and have lawyers who look for any flaw in the file or question the amount of the fines.
From the Gothic neighbourhood association, Martí Cuso stresses that the case of Carrer Ample has been known for years and that actions such as that of its owner are not isolated. In 2016, a study showed that more than half of the buildings in the neighborhood had a tourist offer. And he highlights another issue: "This case shows that we are not only dealing with investment funds of international capital, but also with local rentiers, owners of the city who use housing to make profits and not for social use and have a red carpet." Cuso explains that after the pandemic, the entity's assemblies "were visited by people who were charged 600 euros for a room on the estate when there were no tourists in the city, but who were expelled in a bad way when normality was restored". He applauds the municipal shock plan, but warns that these owners can pay any fine and of the "lack of inspectors and the lack of speed and flexibility of the laws on housing". Now, remember, the big problem in Barcelona is seasonal rentals.
On Wednesday, while tourists continued to enter and leave the wooden door at 42 Ample Street, Oriol and Lourdes, neighbors almost from the street, several generations in the Gothic Quarter, recounted what it costs to resist in the neighborhood. "There is no one left of our children's generation, they can't stay, and also people our age give up. It's the tourist flats and everything that drags them along: the rise in prices, the local commerce that disappears, you can't even walk through the most well-known streets. It's a perverse circle where everything is designed for the tourists."
Artificial intelligence in Valencia and legal mess in Galicia
At different rates and intensities compared to Barcelona, other Spanish city councils have also rolled up their sleeves against the illegal supply of tourist housing. In Madrid, a plan approved when Manuela Carmena was mayor is in force, which left the vast majority of properties outside the law because in the central almond (within the M-30) an independent entrance from the street is necessary. However, compliance with this rule has been deficient and Mayor José Luis Martínez-Almeida has been labeled as permissive by neighborhood associations and the opposition. His government defended itself by saying that the inspections were ineffective because the exercise of the activity of tourist housing was concealed. Almeida announced a new regulation in October, during a visit to Madrid by Mayor Collboni. He said then that the regulation would be ready in three or four months, he also assured that an "effort is being made in inspection", but the consistory did not respond this week if it has closed an illegal offer. The same happens in Valencia, where the City Council assures that they will not be able to have data until after the holidays. Meanwhile, they explain that both in the Valencian capital and in the rest of the community the supply of illegal tourist flats will be controlled with artificial intelligence. The Ministry of Innovation and Tourism is working on a plan to strengthen the work of inspectors (only 11 in the entire region: 4 in Valencia, 4 in Alicante and 3 in Castellón) with the help of algorithms that will crawl tourist accommodation websites. They will contrast the offer with the official registry and those that do not have a license will be sanctioned and closed.
In Andalusia, the regional government has closed 384 illegal tourist flats since 2018, 64 a year, and alleges that it will approve "imminently" the new law that regulates housing for tourist use. The Board advances that with the new regulation it will increase the number of inspectors and improve the technological means to automate the cross-referencing of data with the platforms and thus "pursue clandestine housing". Meanwhile, Seville has recovered a bimonthly table where the phenomenon of clandestine supply is addressed; and Malaga responds that since the inspection is not the responsibility of the municipal administrations, if it collects complaints it refers them to the Board. In Santiago de Compostela, the City Council estimates the illegal offer at 900 flats, but does not provide the figure of those that have closed. Meanwhile, a legal battle is dragging on between the City Council and the owners of tourist homes that has its origin in the moratorium imposed in 2017 by the then mayor Martiño Noriega: the consistory asked them for municipal permission and the sector responded that they were registered with the Xunta. The current municipal executive explains that the courts are resolving disputes in favor of the consistory.
With information from Fernando Peinado (Madrid), Marta Rojo (Valencia), Javier Martín-Arroyo (Seville), Nacho Sánchez (Málaga) and Silvia Pontevedra (Santiago).
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