Some 15 organisations have joined forces to demand a moratorium on new tourist accommodation licences in Sevilla, warning that the boom in short-term rentals is driving ordinary families out of more and more neighbourhoods.
‘The rise of tourist flats is expelling us from areas that were once liveable,’ says Sofía González Reguera, spokesperson for the civic platform Sevilla para Vivir, which launched a petition on Change.org.
‘It used to happen only in the historic centre, now it’s happening in places like Pino Montano too.’
The campaign argues that the moratorium is not an end in itself, but a tool to force a review of illegal holiday lets and to introduce measures to tackle what activists call a ‘housing emergency’ across the city.
The demands
The petition calls on the Ayuntamiento de Sevilla to take three key steps:
- Stop issuing new tourist-flat licences until the right to housing is guaranteed and residents are no longer being priced out.
- Crack down on illegal listings by boosting inspections and shutting down unregistered properties.
- Encourage the reconversion of tourist lets back into homes, refusing to renew current licences and offering incentives for owners to return properties to residential use.
Spain’s capital of illegal tourist flats
In September, Spain’s Housing Ministry identified Sevilla as the city with the highest number of illegal tourist rentals in the country. But Gonzalez Reguera insists that’s only part of the problem.
‘There’s another kind of illegality that the Junta and the city hall allow – letting flats be registered even when they don’t meet the criteria, whether because they’re in saturated areas or on upper floors where tourist use isn’t permitted,’ she told a local newspaper.
She added that enforcement remains weak, as fines are minimal and it takes an average of two years for inspectors to detect illegally registered properties.
A growing political row
This is not the first call for a freeze. In August, the group Sevilla Se Muere urged the city to use powers under Andalucía’s LISTA law to suspend new permits, a measure already adopted in Malaga.
However, mayor Jose Luis Sanz (PP) has argued he cannot impose a three-year moratorium like Málaga because a 2022 revision of Sevilla’s urban plan under the PSOE did not include that provision. He maintains that the regional government, not the city, holds the key to stricter regulation.
The opposition PSOE, meanwhile, accuses Sanz of hiding behind legal excuses. Former mayor and current opposition leader Antonio Muñoz insists a suspension is ‘perfectly possible’ under the Junta’s latest decree-law, which allows councils to pause new licences for up to three years while updating urban-planning rules.
Read more Andalucia news at the Spanish Eye.
