The annulment of the Special Urban Plan for Tourist Accommodations (PEUAT) under Ada Colau's mandate has turned the licensing of tourist apartments into a drain. If the intention of the previous executive was to limit and restrict the opening of new hotel establishments and stop the proliferation of tourist apartments in the city center, the errors detected in the drafting of the planning - which lacked an economic report on the impact of The measures - and the subsequent judicial action have had the opposite effect.
Since the TSJC decreed the nullity of the PEAUT in 2019 until now, justice has forced the City Council to authorize the granting of the tourist license for all those apartments that have requested it. In total, 615 tourist apartments have been authorized, according to data provided by the City Council to La Vanguardia. And there are still 271 cases pending in court, which could raise the number of new tourist apartments to 886. For all this, the housing stock of this type in the city will go from 9,189 in 2021 to 10,075 in the coming months. This represents a growth of almost 10% during Colau's mandate. The City Council regrets that this crack has occurred and considers that "in a housing emergency situation, Barcelona cannot afford to have 10,000 tourist apartments."
The Consistory, after receiving the ruling from the TSJC, is in charge of notifying the Tourism Registry of Catalonia, which depends on the Business Department. Here the figures differ, although slightly. According to the department, the City Council has communicated the registration of 675 new tourist licenses from 2021 to 2023; 60 more than what the City Council says. According to Government data, in 2021, 6 were registered; in 2022, 144; and in 2023, 525.
In any case, the trickle of rulings that agree with the owners does not stop. The City Council's legal services admit that "the annulment of the PEUAT has had the effect of the massive issuance of judgments and judicial resolutions that declare the inadmissibility of the City Council null and void with respect to the owners who requested the license. This is what they express in a written response to the municipal Junts group.
The ban was opened with several rulings issued in 2019 by the TSJC in which the urban plan was declared null and void. The City Council presented an appeal to the Supreme Court that was rejected two years later. The ruling was final in 2021 and the City Council approved a new plan that came into force in January 2022. Those two years were the window that thousands of owners took advantage of to request new licenses, although the majority presented the documentation during the first 15 days , before the City Council presented the appeal. They argued that if the urban plan was null it meant that it was not valid and that the restrictions on requesting new tourist licenses did not exist. In Eixample alone, for example, 1,136 communications were submitted from owners informing them that they would begin to carry out the activity. Faced with that avalanche of communications, the City Council rejected them with the argument that the plan was still valid.
Some owners turned to the courts, which are finally proving them right. The most striking case was that of the apartment block on Tarragona Street, owned by Gallardo Real Estate, where the City Council had to authorize the opening of 120 homes in the same block. It so happens that the same real estate agency has obtained a total of 237 new tourist licenses thanks to this gap, according to data from the Government.
The City Council is committed to deploying more tools “to regulate and restrict this activity” and they positively value the decree law approved by the Government to “organize and limit the activity of housing for tourist use.” From Junts, the spokesperson Jordi Martí Galbis, reproaches that the PEUAT was a large-scale botch, with the negligence and ineptitude of the Colau-Collboni Government they have caused the opposite effect to what was intended.
The more than 800 tourist apartments that will end up being incorporated into Barcelona's offer are even more than those projected by the ERC municipal group, which calculated that in the 15 days of suspension of the PEUAT, 774 homes had been "sneaked in." Esquerra demands the approval of an ordinance that regulates the conditions of tourist apartments.
