Barcelona licence freeze

In the mid­dle of a sum­mer tourist sea­son heat­wave, the new left­ist gov­ern­ment of Barcelona has made one of its more im­per­a­tive elec­toral com­mit­ments a re­al­ity. For a pe­riod of one year, al­though with the pos­si­bil­ity of it being ex­tended to a sec­ond, the City Coun­cil will not award any new li­cences for ho­tels, ser­viced apart­ments, guest houses, stu­dent res­i­dences, youth hos­tels, or tourist apart­ments and homes in any area of the Cata­lan cap­i­tal. The mea­sure is seen by the Coun­cil as a start­ing point for the ap­proval in early 2016 of a reg­u­la­tory frame­work to struc­ture a vital sec­tor in the eco­nomic fab­ric of the city - rep­re­sent­ing 14% of its GDP - but one which in re­cent years has un­der­gone un­con­trolled growth that has led to neigh­bour­hood con­flicts in the areas most af­fected by tourism, such as the well-pub­li­cised case of Barceloneta.

News of the mora­to­rium was pub­lished yes­ter­day and in a press con­fer­ence mid-morn­ing new mayor Ada Colau stressed that the mea­sure is purely tem­po­rary, its aim being there­fore “not to stop tourism”. The new mea­sure af­fects about thirty pro­jects that had al­ready ap­plied for li­cences, none of which will be able to open in the short term.

Re­port on tourism

The basic pur­pose of the mora­to­rium is sim­ply to pre­vent re­quests for open­ing new es­tab­lish­ments from sky­rock­et­ing, with a cool­ing off pe­riod pro­vid­ing the breath­ing space to reach an agree­ment on a new reg­u­la­tory frame­work re­gard­ing tourist ac­com­mo­da­tion. To this end, Colau ex­plained that a mu­nic­i­pal com­mit­tee will be cre­ated and tasked with pre­sent­ing a re­port on tourism in the city, as there are some prac­tices, such as il­le­gally rent­ing out apart­ments or rooms to for­eign vis­i­tors, on which the Coun­cil does not have any es­ti­mates re­gard­ing their scale.

“We want to bring order to tourism, as until now poli­cies have re­sem­bled a patch­work con­sist­ing in putting out fires when­ever they were gen­er­ated” said the mayor.