Tourist apartments rely on Europe to avoid their disappearance from Barcelona

After Spain’s Constitutional Court approved the decree of the Generalitat regulating tourist apartments in Barcelona, property owners and vacation rental managers have placed their hopes in the European Union to prevent the possible end of this activity.

Marian Muro, general director of Apartur, explained in statements to elEconomista.es that the association has strengthened its presence at the European level. According to her, they have filed complaints with EU institutions, maintain constant communication with different members of the European Parliament, and are working closely with the new special committee on the housing crisis in the European Parliament.

From the outset, Apartur took its case to Brussels, arguing that the Barcelona City Council’s initiative—led by Mayor Jaume Collboni—to eliminate tourist apartments in the city by 2029 harms competition. Currently, the association’s only strategy to maintain its activity in the city depends on this European process, in defense of the more than 10,000 legal tourist apartments that exist. Apartur believes that the municipal plan conflicts with the EU Services Directive.

According to Muro, European regulations allow certain obligations to be imposed if they affect general interests such as access to housing, but those measures must be proportionate, non-discriminatory, and justified by a direct cause-and-effect relationship. By contrast, owners claim that in Barcelona restrictions are applied exclusively to tourist apartments and not to other alternatives such as hotels, provide no alternative solutions, and assume without evidence that these apartments will automatically be converted to residential rentals. Apartur insists there is no guarantee that owners of the more than 10,000 tourist apartments will put them on the rental market, since they could assign them to other uses.

Muro also highlights an additional problem for Barcelona: the city cannot afford to lose 40% of its accommodation supply. She warns that the elimination of tourist apartments would make it more difficult to host major international events such as the Mobile World Congress, ISE, or Sónar. In 2024 alone, Barcelona hosted almost 2,000 professional events bringing together more than 734,000 attendees, most of them foreigners.

Finally, the Apartur representative underlined the inconsistency of expanding El Prat Airport to attract more visitors, particularly congress tourism, while at the same time drastically reducing the supply of tourist accommodation in the Catalan capital.