Barcelona strips first 3,000 tourist flats of licences as 2028 ban begins to bite

Barcelona has withdrawn the licences of 3,040 short-term holiday flats, the first tranche of a plan to remove all 10,100 of the city's registered tourist apartments by November 2028, the council confirmed on Tuesday.

The flats, concentrated in the Eixample, Ciutat Vella and Gràcia districts, lose the right to be let to visitors from 31 December. Owners who continue to advertise them face fines of between €60,000 and €600,000, and the council said it had hired 48 additional inspectors and signed data-sharing agreements with the three largest booking platforms to identify listings.

The policy, announced in 2024, rests on a Catalan law that allows licences to expire after five years without renewal in areas where housing is under stress. The city says that the 10,100 flats represent around 1% of its housing stock but as much as 8% in parts of the old town, and that rents have risen 68% in a decade while average wages have risen 19%.

“I grew up in this building and I am the last person in it who is not a suitcase,” said Montserrat Puig, 61, who lives on the Carrer de Girona in the Eixample, where seven of the nine flats in her block are tourist lets. “The council has been promising this for years. I will believe it when I hear a neighbour's television through the wall instead of a wheelie bag on the stairs.”

Apartur, the holiday-rental association, said it would challenge each withdrawal in court and that the measure would cost the city €1.2bn a year in visitor spending and 9,000 jobs. “Barcelona has decided to blame 10,000 flats for a housing shortage caused by 20 years of not building,” a spokesperson said. The association has already lodged more than 800 appeals.

Ana Belén Ruiz, an urban economist at the University of Barcelona who has modelled the policy, said the effect on rents would be real but modest. “Our estimate is that returning all 10,000 units lowers rents in the most affected neighbourhoods by 4-6% over three years, and by roughly nothing elsewhere,” she said. “That is worth doing. It is not a solution. The solution is 50,000 new homes, and nobody is building them.”

The council said that owners of withdrawn flats could sell, let on contracts of at least a year or apply for a €12,000 grant to convert the property to a 10-year social rent. As of Tuesday, 214 had applied.

Similar measures are being studied in Palma, Málaga and Seville, where tourist flats outnumber hotel rooms in several central districts. Lisbon froze new licences in 2023 and Amsterdam limits owners to 30 nights a year.