The limitation of tourist use housing in Catalunya is based on a real diagnosis: residential rental housing has become a scarce and pressured asset. However, applying a homogeneous restriction to Barcelona and coastal municipalities where second residences predominate introduces an evident distortion: not every tourist apartment is a dwelling that would return to regular rental.
The Generalitat approved Decree-Law 3/2023 to subject tourist use housing to prior urban planning permission in municipalities with housing access problems or high concentrations of tourist apartments. Additionally, the regulation sets a ceiling: no more licenses can be granted than the equivalent of 10 tourist apartments for every 100 inhabitants, and the licenses have a validity of five years, extendable if urban planning allows.
The declared objective is to protect the residential stock. The decree itself asserts that tourist housing does not come from new construction, but from the change of use of existing homes, which reduces the potential supply of permanent housing. This argument is particularly strong in large cities with high year-round residential and tourist demand, such as Barcelona.
There, the problem is clear. Barcelona does not face seasonal tourism but rather a constant pressure on the real estate market. The profitability of platforms like Airbnb, combined with high occupancy rates for a good part of the year, has made tourist rentals directly compete with residential rentals. The city council has recovered 3,743 illegal tourist apartments for residential use in the last decade, according to municipal data collected by SER Catalunya; in 2024 alone, there were 270 homes.
The Catalan capital has gone further: it plans to extinguish the nearly 10,000 licenses for tourist apartments by 2028. This is a debatable decision in its economic effects, but coherent with an urban diagnosis: where each dwelling can be a usual residence, a tourist home, or a financial asset, the administration has clear incentives to prioritize residential use.
The problem arises when that same reasoning is applied without nuances to coastal towns.
In many coastal towns of Catalonia, vacation rentals do not function as a substitute for long-term rentals. They serve as an economic complement for owners who maintain second residences, use them part of the year, and rent them out in summer to cover community fees, property taxes, insurance, utilities, or maintenance. The administrative hypothesis —“if tourist use is limited, that dwelling will return to the residential market”— does not hold. In many cases, it simply will not return because it was never really available for year-round living.
The Catalan Competition Authority already pointed out a paradoxical consequence of the chosen ratio: small municipalities, especially those on the Costa Brava, Costa Daurada, and areas of the Pyrenees, could bear the strongest immediate impact, while Barcelona, due to its large population, could even be less affected by the proportional calculation. The report warned that the ratio of 5 tourist apartments for every 100 inhabitants —used to identify at-risk municipalities— meant that municipalities with smaller populations would bear the consequences of the limitation more intensely.
That is the core of the nonsensical situation: a ratio per inhabitant penalizes municipalities where the registered population is low but the seasonal population is structurally high. A coastal town may have 5,000 residents in winter and multiply that number several times in summer. Measuring its tourist reality solely based on the census is tantamount to ignoring its economic model, its stock of second residences, and its seasonality.
It is not a matter of denying that there is a problem with the supply of long-term rentals. But public policy should distinguish between two different realities: the professionalized tourist apartment in a pressured residential market and the second residence rented for a few weeks a year. Municipalities whose economies depend on a dispersed tourist offer need the supply of vacation housing to complement hotels, campsites, and hostels. Thousands of jobs are at stake.
Catalan regulation rightly recognizes that residential tourism can have effects on the supply of usual housing. But it forgets that the country's economy largely depends on the tourism sector and fails when it turns a tool intended to contain urban pressure into a general corset for territories with radically different dynamics.
Barcelona needs a housing policy for a large city: inspection, fraud sanctioning, recovery of residential use, and strict limits where tourist rental displaces homes. Coastal towns need a different logic: license control, neighbor coexistence, and proportional criteria that take into account seasonality, second residences, and economic dependence on tourism.
Regulating is not about applying the same number to everyone. Regulating well means discriminating with precision. In Catalunya, the debate over tourist apartments should not be “yes or no” to vacation rentals, but where, how, with what intensity, and on what type of housing. Because a family second residence in a coastal municipality is not the same as a professionalized apartment in the center of Barcelona. And a regulation that does not distinguish between the two runs the risk of protecting less housing than it promises and harming more local economy than it acknowledges.