Where are most of Spain's illegal tourist lets?

Following news that the Spanish government is cracking down on illegal Airbnbs, The Local looks into the numbers and finds out which parts of Spain have the highest (and lowest) proportion of unlicenced holiday lets.

Spain’s Consumer Affairs Ministry recently ordered Airbnb to delete nearly 66,000 listings for short-term lets in the country because they're breaching housing laws.

The Ministry specifically asked the holiday rental company to take down 65,935 tourist accommodation ads because it considers them to be in violation of regulations.

Reporting in the Spanish media suggests this could affect almost 20 percent of the total Airbnb listings in Spain.

As things stand, only Airbnb listings in Andalusia, Madrid, Catalonia, Valencia, the Balearic Islands, and the Basque Country will be affected by the government's initial crackdown.

The first of these rulings was issued at the end of last year and affected 5,800 homes in several regions across the country. This ruling was upheld by the Superior Court of Justice of Madrid, but Airbnb later appealed in May of this year. Now the final ruling has been issued.

The most common violation is that the properties have failed to provide their tourist licence on the advert, which is mandatory in several regions.

This could mean the properties don’t have separate entrances, that locals have voted against them or they are located in historic central areas of cities where licences are no longer issued.

Airbnb has increasingly dominated the short-term tourist rental market not only in Spain but around the world. In many ways, the company has become the bogeyman of Spain's anti-tourism movement, but in reality it's just one company among many that advertise pisos turísticos in Spain.

Where are Spain's unlicenced tourist properties?

According to figures from a study carried out by tourism think tank Mabrian for Spanish hospitality website HostelTur, there are around 400,000 total tourist apartments operating in Spain, but 38 percent of them are advertised online without reporting their tourist licence number.

Digging into the data a little more, we can see some stark regional differences between parts of Spain, with some regions really cracking down on unlicenced accommodation, whereas others seem to be doing very little as over 80 percent of properties advertised there have no licence on the advert.

Note that there is not concrete data in terms of absolute numbers available, rather the proportion of unlicenced properties.

Highest proportion of Airbnbs advertised without licences (by province)

By province, the parts of Spain with the highest proportion of unlicenced properties (or those advertised without them, at least) are the following:

Albacete 86.8 percent
Madrid 86.5 percent
Ciudad Real 77.1 percent
Guadalajara 75.8 percent
Cuenca 73.1 percent
Cantabria 72.6 percent
Valencia 70.3 percent
Navarre 69.8 percent
Pontevedra 69.1 percent
Valladolid 67.9 percent

The capital Madrid, long a bastion of deregulation and centre-right free markets, has the second highest proportion in Spain. Though the total numbers are hard to quantify, it seems safe to assume that Madrid will have the highest absolute number of unlicenced tourist flats in Spain and probably by some margin.

Interestingly, it also seems that provinces across central and northern Spain (besides Catalonia) have higher proportions of unlicenced tourist flats than in the south.

Other tourist hotspots also have notable figures. The Balearic Islands, for example, has 67.8 percent of ads available reporting tourist licences.

The province of Alicante, however, the province with the second highest number of tourist flats available in Spain, has a healthy majority of its ads (56.8 percent) not including tourist licence information in adverts.

Of course, that an advert doesn't include the licence information does not necessarily mean the property doesn't have one, but it's a useful tool for indicating the likelihood in reality.

Lowest proportion of Airbnbs advertised without licences (by province)

The breakdown of figures for those provinces with the lowest proportion of unlicenced properties (or those advertised without them, at least) confirms this geographical correlation and reveals a clear concentration of provinces with low rates of unlicenced properties in southern Spain.

Provinces across Catalonia and Andalusia, two of Spain’s most popular tourist destinations, have the lowest percentages in Spain.

Both areas, particularly the Catalan capital, Barcelona, were at the forefront of Spain’s anti-tourism protest wave last year and are particularly sensitive to the ill effects of over tourism and its knock-on impact on the local housing market. Similarly, Andaluz cities like Seville, Málaga and Granada have also been very active in anti-tourism movements.

The low percentages suggest that regional and local governments there are better enforcing tourist accommodation rules and policing offenders.