The MariCarmen Effect: Spain’s rush to rewrite the rental rules

MariCarmen’s eviction from the Madrid apartment she had lived in for more than 70 years became a symbol of Spain’s housing crisis and accelerated political action on legislation that had previously stalled. Days later, new rules covering temporary rentals, tourist accommodation and taxation were approved. But will tightening the rules around temporary and tourist rentals actually help solve the housing problem MariCarmen’s case exposed?

A week can be a very long time in Spanish housing policy.

On 23 September, 87-year-old MariCarmen Abascal was evicted from the Madrid apartment she had called home for more than 70 years.

Her story quickly travelled far beyond the Retiro neighbourhood. Protesters gathered in Puerta del Sol, the eviction dominated national coverage and housing, already one of Spain’s most politically charged issues, was once again at the centre of public debate.

Within days, negotiations over housing legislation that had previously struggled to find sufficient political support accelerated dramatically.

On 29 September, the Council of Ministers approved two housing decrees, with the first published in the BOE the following morning. Both are due to face parliamentary votes on Friday 2nd October.

Contemporary reporting has directly connected the renewed political momentum with the reaction to MariCarmen’s eviction. Yet the legislation that emerged reaches considerably further than the circumstances that made her case so powerful.

It covers vulnerable tenants and evictions, but also temporary rentals, room rentals, tourist accommodation, VAT and municipal taxation of tourist properties.

For Spain’s short-term rental industry, this raises a difficult but necessary question: are all of these measures really addressing the same housing problem?

MariCarmen’s case exposed a failure in housing protection

MariCarmen’s circumstances were exceptional.

She had lived in the apartment since 1956 under a renta antigua contract originally signed by her father. After successive family subrogations, she was paying around €440 to €500 per month for a property in Madrid’s Retiro district.

The building was sold in 2018 and the apartment was subsequently acquired by Urbagestión Desarrollo e Inversiones. The company later challenged the continuation of her tenancy and ultimately won its case in the Supreme Court. It offered her a new rental agreement at a substantially higher market rent, which exceeded what she could afford from her pension.

Legally, the owner prevailed. Socially, the result was much harder to accept.

An 87-year-old woman with limited financial means lost the home she had occupied for most of her life. After enormous public pressure, an agreement was eventually reached allowing her to return under a new eight-year contract, with the rent capped at 30% of her income.

There is a bigger question here than whether one landlord should have behaved differently.

If someone is elderly, vulnerable and unable to afford market housing after spending most of their life in a protected tenancy, should the solution depend upon persuading a private property owner to provide that social protection?

Or should that safety net come from the State?

Private landlords, whether individuals or businesses, operate within the housing market. They have mortgages, maintenance costs, taxes, employees and their own financial pressures. Asking them to carry indefinitely a responsibility that ultimately belongs to social housing policy does not solve the underlying problem.

That does not remove the need for controls against abusive practices, particularly where residential property is acquired specifically to remove existing tenants and extract significantly higher returns.

It does, however, make it important to distinguish between protecting vulnerable people, controlling speculative investment and regulating ordinary landlords and accommodation businesses.

They are related issues, but they are not interchangeable.

So how did we get from MariCarmen to temporary rentals?

One of the most significant parts of Real Decreto-ley 26/2026 is the attempt to define much more tightly what constitutes temporary residential accommodation.

Under the new framework, a temporary rental must exist because the tenant has been temporarily displaced from their habitual residence for a genuine and demonstrable reason. The contract must explain that reason and the landlord carries the responsibility for demonstrating it.

Its duration will generally be more than 31 days and no longer than 12 months, although it may continue where the reason for the temporary displacement genuinely persists.

If the temporary nature of the arrangement cannot be justified, the consequences are significant. The contract can be treated retrospectively as an ordinary habitual residential tenancy.

There is a legitimate problem behind this.

An 11-month contract should not provide an automatic means of taking what is really someone’s permanent home outside residential tenancy protections.

Spanish courts were already looking beyond the duration written on a contract and considering the genuine purpose of the tenancy.

Closing deliberate loopholes is one thing.

The concern for the professional rental sector is what happens when legislation designed to prevent abuse begins to capture legitimate temporary accommodation too.

People relocate for work. They undertake six-month projects. They study. They receive medical treatment. They move to a new city and rent while looking for a permanent home. Families need somewhere to live while renovating or purchasing a property. International workers and professionals increasingly divide their lives between different countries.

These are not necessarily landlords trying to disguise permanent residential tenancies. They are real reasons why people need somewhere to live for longer than a holiday but considerably less than five or seven years.

The rental market has evolved because the way people live and work has evolved. Legislation needs to recognise that distinction.

The problem with a neat 31-day line

The new decree attempts to create a clearer boundary.

Tourist accommodation regulated under regional tourism legislation cannot exceed 31 days under the new national framework. Temporary residential accommodation begins above 31 days and must satisfy the new requirements surrounding temporary need.

For VAT, furnished accommodation rented to the same guest for no more than 30 nights will, subject to the provisions of the decree, move into the 10% VAT regime from 1 December.

The categories look relatively straightforward on paper. In practice, accommodation does not always fit so conveniently into them.

Consider someone who needs to move away from home for three weeks for medical treatment: the stay is too short to qualify as temporary residential accommodation under the new definition, but depending on the autonomous community and the property involved, it may not fit neatly within regional tourist accommodation rules either.

Or consider someone who relocates permanently to Spain but needs a furnished apartment for three months while searching for a permanent home. They have a genuine short-term housing requirement, but are they temporarily displaced from a habitual residence in the sense envisaged by the legislation?

Then there are people spending several months somewhere simply because they want to. Where does a three-month lifestyle stay sit?

These are practical questions, not theoretical loopholes, and operators will need clarity.

There is also likely to be debate around the relationship between the national 31-day ceiling and the powers of Spain’s autonomous communities, which have significant responsibility for tourism regulation.

The 21% VAT that became 10%

The speed at which the legislation was negotiated also matters.

Only days before the final decree, a 21% VAT rate on tourist accommodation was still being publicly discussed.

The published text ultimately settled on 10%.

The Government’s reasoning is clear. It argues that tourist accommodation affects residential supply and should be taxed in accordance with the commercial activity it represents.

The decree cites Banco de España data indicating that tourist homes represent around 10% of Spain’s rental market nationally, while acknowledging far greater concentrations in particular locations, including the historic centres of Málaga and Seville.

That local concentration is important.

Few people working professionally in short-term rentals would argue that tourism has no impact on housing in destinations where holiday accommodation is heavily concentrated. Some cities and neighbourhoods clearly require targeted responses.

The harder question is whether the same policy response makes sense across an entire country where the relationship between tourism and housing varies enormously from one market to another.

The movement from a proposed 21% VAT rate to 10% in the final stages also shows how quickly important commercial decisions were changing immediately before approval.

For businesses that have to set prices, sign owner agreements, employ staff and make investment decisions months or years ahead, regulatory certainty matters too.

Taking a property out of STR does not create a long-term rental

This is perhaps the biggest assumption worth challenging.

Much of Spain’s housing debate rests on an apparently simple equation: reduce tourist and temporary rentals and more homes will become available to permanent residents.

Some will; yet there is no guarantee that every owner leaving short-term rental will become a long-term landlord.

They may sell. They may move into the property themselves. They may leave it empty. It may become a second home. They may decide that the financial return no longer compensates for the regulatory risk associated with renting it at all.

That distinction matters.

The Canary Islands are already providing an interesting test case. Industry representatives there argue that properties leaving vacation rentals have not necessarily moved into conventional residential rental. The available figures need stronger independent evidence before firm conclusions can be drawn, but the underlying question deserves attention.

If regulation removes a property from one market, what evidence do we have about where it goes next?

Spain does not simply need fewer tourist rentals. It needs more homes that people can afford to rent and buy.

Those are not automatically the same policy.

Who should pay for Spain’s housing crisis?

This is where the conversation becomes uncomfortable for the government and policy makers. Spain has a housing problem, and vulnerable people need meaningful protection.

There are also legitimate concerns about speculative property investment, particularly where buildings or portfolios are acquired with a strategy based on removing existing tenants, rapidly increasing rents or extracting value from markets already under severe housing pressure.

That deserves its own regulatory response. But Spain’s rental market is not made up solely of institutional investors.

It includes individual property owners, families with one or two investment properties, local property managers and accommodation businesses employing people and contributing positively to local economies.

Policies intended to control highly speculative investment can have very different consequences when applied to a Spanish family renting an inherited apartment, a small property management company or a professional operator managing homes on behalf of local owners.

The distinction matters because housing policy changes behaviour.

If the regulatory, legal and financial risk of renting property becomes too high, some owners will not move into long-term rental. They will leave the rental market altogether.

That does little for the person looking for somewhere affordable to live.

Tourism is part of the housing conversation, but it cannot become the whole conversation

The short-term rental industry definitely has a role in this debate.

Where tourist accommodation is heavily concentrated, its impact on residential communities, local prices and housing availability should be examined properly, and professional operators and regional associations have already shown willingness to have that conversation.

But Spain’s housing crisis is considerably larger than short-term rentals.

It involves housing supply, planning, social housing, affordability, wages, demographic change, investment, empty properties, construction and the enormous differences between individual local markets.

It also involves a rental population whose needs have changed.

There are permanent residents, students, seasonal workers, remote workers, corporate relocations, people undergoing medical treatment, families between homes and millions of visitors; not all of them need the same type of accommodation.

Nor should every private owner or rental business be treated as though they are responsible for solving the structural failures of Spain’s housing system.

The lesson from MariCarmen

MariCarmen’s story deserves to remain part of this conversation because it exposed something that clearly went wrong.

A vulnerable 87-year-old woman reached the point of being physically removed from the home she had occupied for more than 70 years before the different parts of the State were able to find a solution.

The public reaction eventually produced one, but perhaps the question should not simply be why her landlord did not provide that solution sooner.

It should also be why Spain’s housing system allowed responsibility for protecting someone in MariCarmen’s circumstances to reach the door of the property owner in the first place.

That is a social policy question.

Preventing abuse of temporary rental contracts is a regulatory question.

Controlling highly speculative investment is another.

Managing tourism pressure in individual destinations is another again.

Spain needs answers to all of them, but treating them as one problem risks producing regulation that penalises legitimate rental activity without creating the housing supply the country desperately needs.

The real measure of this week’s legislation will not be how many temporary or tourist rentals disappear.

It will be whether the homes Spain wants to release actually become the homes Spain needs.