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A judge in Madrid has ordered the closure of 10 tourist flats in a single building in the city centre after a landmark ruling that said “the illicit and unsanitary activities” taking place in them had inflicted psychological damage on a neighbouring family and violated their fundamental right to privacy.
The family, who have two children and who have not been named, said they had suffered stress, anxiety and sleep deprivation because of the loud, drunken, destructive and lewd behaviour of guests, which included vandalism, vomiting and having sex in the block’s communal areas.
The ruling, which has just been made public, comes amid continuing protests over the social and economic consequences of overtourism and the lack of affordable housing.
The family live in a block of 60 flats near the Spanish capital’s Plaza Mayor, 75% of which are run as tourist rentals. Two years ago, they engaged a lawyer to represent them after efforts to address the problem with the city council and the owners of the rentals came to nothing.
“The family have one tourist flat above them, another below them, and more tourist flats near their bedrooms,” said their lawyer, Miguel Ángel Rubio.
“The family came to me and told me that they’d been to the police who’d come with a decibel metre and had fined the owners €16,000. But the problem is that [the companies that own these flats and others] can make more than €150,000 in rents in a single weekend, so a €16,000 fine is nothing for them. So I had to bring a case on the grounds that the family’s fundamental rights were being violated – and it succeeded.”
Rubio said the case was groundbreaking as at stake was not whether the flats themselves were illegal or unlicensed, but whether the activities in and around them were severely damaging the family’s basic rights and quality of life.
The judge, in her ruling, said ample evidence had been provided of the stresses and strains that the family had suffered.
“The constant noise, the breaking of shared fixtures, the filling of the lobby with suitcases at all hours and the presence of shopping trolleys filled with towels and other cleaning items for the multiple tourist-use flats, thus impeding the movements of neighbours, have been duly proven and are not isolated incidents,” she noted.
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Also proven were “guests using the common areas for sexual relations”, multiple police visits, “vomiting in the courtyards” and broken mailboxes and lift fittings. At one point, the judge said, things had got so bad that a security guard was hired.
The judge rejected the rental owners’ claims that the family was merely experiencing the kind of day-to-day disruption any neighbour could expect, adding: “The actions were not merely irritating but also unsanitary, indecent and even illegal.”
After finding that the family’s “fundamental right to personal and family privacy” had been violated, the judge ordered 10 of the flats in the block to close and awarded the family damages of almost €39,000 (£33,700).
Rubio said: “The family are very happy and very positive because the judge has ordered the flats to stop operating and has ordered the owners to pay them damages.” He said he had been inundated with calls from people in similar situations since news of the case emerged on Monday.
In recent years, increasing overtourism has exposed the scale of Spain’s housing crisis and prompted nationwide protests. The shortage of housing stock has been exacerbated by the boom in tourist rental flats.
Rents have increased 80% over the past decade, outpacing wage rises, and a recent Bank of Spain report estimated that almost half of tenants spend 40% of their income on rent and utility bills, compared with an EU average of 27%.
Last year, the mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni, said he would end apartment rentals to tourists by 2028 by scrapping the licences of the 10,101 flats currently approved as short-term rentals.
Although the Spanish government recently ordered Airbnb to take down more than 65,000 illegal adverts, a recent study by the consumer and social rights ministry found that more than 15,200 tourist flats in Madrid are operating without the necessary licences.
