Tourism

Barcelona City Council is fully implementing November’s Decree-Law 3/2023, under which existing permits will expire within four years and no new permits will be issued. That means that Barcelona’s existing ten thousand holiday flats will re-enter the city’s housing market, for sale or rental.

“The City Council has decided to fully implement the new Decree Law, which means that those ten thousand holiday flats will become homes by November 2028,” announced Mayor Jaume Collboni during the press conference at which he presented the Viure Plan (a Plan for Living), accompanied by Deputy Mayor Laia Bonet and Fourth Deputy Mayor Jordi Valls.

Collboni continued, “We aim to completely end holiday use of residential flats in Barcelona.” “Those homes will therefore join the rental or sales market, to be lived in by the residents of Barcelona,” so preventing “people from having to leave the city,” said the Mayor.

The ending of the permits is part of the Viure Plan. The Plan also includes a requirement for 30% of private developments to be given over to public housing. The Plan as a whole has been developed by teams in the City Council, working with Carme Trilla, former head of the Housing Department of the Regional Government and economist. The Mayor went on to say that “with this set of initiatives, the City Council aims to reverse the current stagnation in the supply of housing and the upward trend in its cost.”

No new holiday flat permits will be issued

The November-Decree-Law to enact urgent measures in the permitting of holiday flats provides that once existing permits have expired , each local authority must include holiday flats in its local plan, if they think it appropriate. The Deputy Mayor indicated that the Special Urban Plan for Holiday Accommodation in Barcelona (PEUAT, in its initials in Catalan), will not include a category for holiday flats, so that there will be no new permits for that type of accommodation.

It was explained that illegal holiday lets have decreased significantly in Barcelona thanks to the inspection work carried out by the City Council. There are three hundred complaints lodged on average each month. The Fourth Deputy Mayor said that “inspection is a genuinely effective tool.” “We have an obligation to combat illegality,” he asserted, while at the same time “continuing to structure our relationships with online holiday accommodation platforms, in cases where we have an existing relationship, and in cases where we don’t.”