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Yahoo
16-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Spain housing crisis: Locals blame tourists and speculators
The real estate agent Juan Sanchez, who didn't want his real name published in this article, pushes open the frosted glass door of an apartment that used to be a shop. Visitors step directly into the kitchen from the streets of Spain's capital. The ceilings are very high. "You could easily add a mezzanine here," Sanchez says, and explains that the two bedrooms advertised are in the basement, and rather tiny. One of them doesn't even have a window. However, the space could be "easily rented out to students" for €1,300 ($1,484) if the prospective buyer is willing to ignore what he calls "a small catch." "Downstairs is officially listed as a storage space in the property registry, because we couldn't get a residential permit. But that's not a problem for renters," he tells DW. The 55-square-meter (592 square-feet) space, advertised as an apartment, located in a middle-class neighborhood in central Madrid, is listed to sell for over €300,000. Unlike a decade ago, when cheap credit boosted the housing prices in Spain, today, the sky-high prices even for mid-range apartments are driven by foreign investors with deep pockets. They've invested huge sums in Spain's lucrative housing sector and booming tourism industry, driving up prices in the entire housing market in the process. According to a report by the Spanish institute BBVA Research, demand is outstripping supply significantly. Those living in Spain, meanwhile, are struggling to afford skyrocketing rents, a situation compounded by the growing share of homes being rented out to international tourists visiting Spain, and students seeking accommodation. Spain's worsening housing crisis has already sparked repeated protests on the Canary Islands, in Barcelona and in Madrid. These days, internet platforms like sell even small living spaces to investors. The Spanish property startup allows users to purchase — rather than rent — individual rooms in a shared property as an alternative investment and living option. For the Madrid tenants' union Sindicato de Inquilinas de Madrid, the practice amounts to "rampant speculation" fueled by tourism and investment funds. The group has estimated that this has resulted in more than 4 million homes and 400,000 vacation rentals currently standing empty — in a country of 47 million people. But the housing shortage isn't just due to external demand. Locals are contributing to it, too. According to the Spanish national statistics office INE, over 2.5 million homes in Spain are only used occasionally, with many of them presumed to be second or third residences — often reserved for holidays, and rarely rented to others. Private investors and hedge funds are less reluctant to rent. In the first quarter of 2025, short-term leases, not counting tourist rentals, accounted for 14% of the rental market, or a 25% increase from the previous year, according to data compiled by the real estate platform Idealista. The platform reported the largest growth of short-term rental listings in cities like Bilbao (up 36%), Alicante (33%), Barcelona (29%), and Madrid (23%). In May, the Spanish ministry for consumer rights made headlines when it ordered the short-term rentals platform Airbnb to remove nearly 66,000 unlicensed listings. The Spanish Housing and Urban Planning Minister Isabel Rodriguez is also pushing a bill that would require vacationers to pay 21% VAT on apartment rentals — double the rate applied to hotel stays. But tenant groups like Sindicatos de Inquilinas say that's not nearly enough. Similar to the years preceding the 2008 financial crisis, Spain's real estate market is showing signs of overheating again. A house that cost an average of €138,000 in 2014 was valued at €178,700 in 2024, according to data from the US-based investment firm MD Capital. In places like the Balearic Islands, prices have more than doubled. Tim Wirth, a real estate lawyer based in Palma, says that the sharp rise in prices "inevitably leads to protests from local residents." He told DW that rentals in Spain must be made more attractive again with "legal and tax security for both sides." But he also acknowledges the acute social challenge in the fact that average wages have grown by a little over 23% in the past decade, while property prices have shot up by at least 29% in the same time period. In 2024, the average monthly gross salary in Spain was €2,642, according to the economic and socio-demographic information platform Datosmacro. An ordinary 80-square-meter apartment now costs about €1,100 a month to rent, as data from the real estate portal Fotocasa shows, with rental costs for a similar apartment in major cities like Madrid or Barcelona ranging between €1,400 and €1,500. Unlike people living in cities such as Paris or London, Spanish residents do not receive a supplement to their salaries to offset higher housing costs. Each year, some 90 million international tourists visit Spain. Many remote workers have set up residence in the Canary Islands and Barcelona, while students from across the world flock to the country's 90 universities and dozens of business schools. In the 2024/2025 academic year alone, more than 118,000 students came to Spain under the European Union students' exchange program Erasmus. Spain, however, lacks publicly funded student accommodation, and there is no financial support from the state equivalent to Germany's BAföG aid program for students from low-income households. That's one reason why Spanish citizens typically leave their parents' home after the age of 30, as official statistics show. In Germany, the average age is 24. In addition, public housing is scarce, with only about 14,370 state-sponsored housing units built in 2024. Between 2007 and 2021, Spain allocated just €34 per capita to social housing — far below the EU average of €160. Madrid's tenant lobby, meanwhile, has threatened to escalate public protests if the government doesn't take stronger action: "We'll raise our voices to reclaim what's vacant or being rented to tourists," a spokesperson told DW. This article was originally written in German.
The National
09-05-2025
- Business
- The National
What the undying fire at the world's oldest restaurant teaches us about keeping culture alive
The large cobblestoned expanse of Madrid's Plaza Mayor – the centuries-old grand central square with its exquisite architecture – is described in guidebooks as the beating heart of the city. On any given day, small clusters of walking tour groups typically mill around the Madrid plaza listening on with varying degrees of concentration to the patter of well-rehearsed lines delivered by patient, thoughtful guides. They will tell you that Plaza Mayor has been the site of celebration, condemnation and bullfights through its long history. Street vendors ply their trade on its open spaces offering the near ubiquitous global commodity of replica football shirts for sale, while cafes provide shade and succour at the plaza's perimeter in the form of coffee and churros, the highly calorific but delicious fried dough and dipping chocolate snack. If you duck for shade at the Arco de Cuchilleros on one corner of the plaza, you'll find a tumbledown, mildly treacherous stone staircase leading to street level and a few metres further on you'll stumble upon Restaurante Botin, founded in 1725, 300 years ago. The restaurant's menu proudly proclaims in capital letters that it is 'the earliest restaurant in the world' before adding in humble parentheses 'according to the Guinness Book of Records' as a form of justification to laying claim to the title. The accolade is based on several criteria, including that the restaurant has been open continuously at the same location and trading under the same name – it was originally established by Jean Botin – for three centuries. You may have seen some reporting elsewhere marking Botin's birthday. The Times of London said it was the place to find Madrid's soul. The Financial Times wondered whether the restaurant was not much more than a tourist trap. Others have said Botin dishes up centuries of culinary traditions to its patrons. Each one of those conclusions may well be correct. It is true that tourists regularly mill around outside the building, watching groups of visitors sweep inside to fulfil reservations secured weeks before, but it is also a place to experience and to pay homage to tradition and perseverance. The caveat emptor is that the restaurant's speciality is suckling pig, although it also offers a collection of meat, fish and vegetarian dishes on its menu as alternatives. Part of the restaurant's fame was cemented by Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, itself nearly a century old, and the fleeting reference to a hot and bright Madrid day and his protagonists lunching upstairs at Botin's, which is described as 'one of the best restaurants in the world'. The reference is typically perfunctory and unembellished but delivered with trademark certainty on Hemingway's pages. I was fortunate to dine at Botin's last year more by happenstance than judgment. We hadn't used the online booking system to secure a table in advance, instead we doorstepped the staff at lunchtime to secure a slot in the evening. We were grateful for our seats, although we may have been stationed at the worst table in the house – next to a service area and a thoroughfare that led to a stairwell and the 'upstairs' of Hemingway's pages – and at a far earlier time than many would consider for evening dining. But ours may well have been the best table, too, as we watched the ebb and flow of expectant patrons and busy staff. The dinner was lovely. The service was, by turns, attentive and charmingly unfocused, and the setting was memorable. The restaurant's decor is a mix of mediums, colour and lived experience. The bill was also a pleasant surprise when it arrived. Oddly, for an outlet that is now 300 years old, Botin may well have faced its most difficult challenge only five years ago. Southern Europe was hit particularly hard by the first phase of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020 when all 'non-essential' economic activities were stopped. The restaurant's wood-fired oven might have fallen into forced disuse. The tradition of keeping the oven going, it had never once cooled down in its 295-year existence to that point in time, persisted even in these most challenging days. The symbolism of keeping the fire alive every day was rich, but there was a practical purpose, too. The era of the unknown was met head on by the certainty of maintaining routine, because no one knew what would happen to the oven and the building if the fires were allowed to cool. The so-called new normal was faced off by the normal routines of the pre-pandemic era. Even last month, when power cuts swept across Spain and Portugal, Botin's fire kept on burning. The message of preserving cultural assets and keeping them going in the face of adversity is a universal one, just as the idea that a restaurant can survive (let alone thrive) ever-shifting tastes for three centuries is a fanciful one. But Botin's lesson to the world is also that it is possible to flourish over the long term, but only with the right mix of determination, heritage and conviction.
