With more than 6,600 registered tourist homes, very few municipalities have such a high proportion of chalets, flats and apartments for rent for occasional visitors as Salou. With 29,000 registered inhabitants, it is the epicenter of the Costa Daurada, a paradigm of sun and beach tourism.
Mecca of this type of tourist accommodation, they are owned in the vast majority of cases by vacationers from Aragon and Lleida, highlighted in the ranking, Tarragona and other points in the Barcelona area and from outside Catalonia, such as Navarra. The owners rent the house to tourists all year round, except for their vacation weeks. Due to the distance and convenience, they almost always resort to the services of the seventy tourist rental companies on the Costa Daurada or to digital platforms.
In this business, the owners have a profitable formula to pay for the maintenance of their homes or pay for vacations. Specialized companies, most of them small or medium-sized, in some cases with 200 and 300 tourist homes in their portfolio, have seen their business mature and grow in twenty years.
“Maybe it is time to not give out more licenses, maybe we have reached the limit in Salou, but don't ruin the sector like this,” criticizes Quim Cristià, a tourist rental businessman.
Owners and rental companies, with the support of the employers' association (Federació Empresarial d'Hostaleria i Turisme de la Província de Tarragona) and the Salou City Council, with Sumem per Salou-PSC in the mayor's office and ERC as a government partner, face common against the new regulation promoted by the Generalitat. The new norm, in the form of a decree law, has to go through Parliament, so the game of political pressure could be key.
In Salou, due to the enormous weight of tourist housing and its registered population –29,000 residents compared to nine million tourist overnight stays annually–, the change in the rules of the game will force, if the Government does not back down, to close 70% of the tourist flats. Some 4,000 homes will lose their license.
With two million tourists each year, only Benidorm (Alicante) surpasses Salou on the peninsular coast, Barcelona on one side and in another league: 17.3 million overnight stays, almost 28 million annual visits and 3.5 million of tourists staying in its controversial tourist apartments.
In the case of Benidorm (69,738 registered residents), larger in size and tourist volume, it is surprising to see that it has fewer homes for tourist use than Salou: 3,750 apartments, with a total of 17,200 beds.
Contrary to what is happening in Salou, Benidorm's hotel employers have launched this year against the proliferation of tourist homes, with strong growth since the pandemic. Hoteliers consider that licenses in residential buildings should be prohibited because “they affect coexistence and cause tourismphobia.”
In Salou there are specific problems with the neighbors, especially in summer and in some specific areas, the most touristy, but the sector's employers do not attack a type of accommodation that has coexisted naturally with hotels. They complement each other and are aimed at very different audiences.
The Salou City Council, with the presence of PSC and ERC in the municipal government, with the independent mayor Pere Granados (Sumem per Salou) at the helm, defends housing for tourist use tooth and nail. The mayor, outraged by the new regulations of the Generalitat, warns that without this type of accommodation, the large tourist center of the Costa Daurada will not be able to respond to the very high demand, and will lose competitiveness and economic activity.
Granados recalls that the City Council already had on the table the suspension of licenses for tourist apartments and the idea of excluding this type of accommodation in the most residential areas, such as the Eix Cívic. “It is one thing not to give more licenses and another very different thing is to reduce the current apartments by half. It is an attack on the principle of equality, and the owners would have to be compensated,” warns Granados. “What will we do with the tourists? “This way we will expel them to other areas.”
The demand, very solid, is mainly from tourists from all over Spain, the rest of Catalonia and France, especially from visitors who travel by car and seek the comfort of living in an apartment without schedules and with fewer expenses.
Salou promotes a tourism alliance with other Catalan coastal towns with similar characteristics, with Lloret de Mar as the main partner on the Costa Brava. With almost 39,000 registered inhabitants, 10,000 more residents than Salou, Lloret has half the number of homes for tourist use (3,254), so it still has room to grow by about 600 licenses, until reaching a ceiling of over 3,900 tourist apartments.
Salou does not ask for growth, but it opposes the mass revocation of licenses. In Catalonia it is estimated that a minimum of 28,000 tourist rentals would have to be eliminated. Businessmen in the sector in Salou assure that they are in favor of regulation after growing without hardly any limitations.
“We are the first interested in good regulation, for a sustainable business that does not cause inconvenience. But you cannot charge 60% of the tourist housing licenses in Salou; We coexist perfectly with hotels and campsites,” says Cristià.
Salou has 30,000 registered homes, of which only a little more than a third (11,000) are first homes. Its population skyrockets when summer arrives and at specific times, such as Easter and long weekends.
The sector assures that putting a fence on the tourist apartment will not solve the problem of the first home on the Costa Daurada because they are apartments that will remain empty and will only be used when their owners come on vacation.
