Sustainable Tourism Law

PRIVATE HOLIDAY RENTALS IN SPANISH LAW 193 d) allowing this type of rental undercuts municipal town and country planning There is one further argument: the idea that legally allowing the ability to rent out apartments to tourists would undercut town and country planning capacities in municipalities. In fact, we already know that town and country planning includes the definition of the uses or purposes both for land (plots) and for the buildings constructed on said land: this technique is known as zoning regarding plots of land or areas. When implementing their responsibility in this regard, municipalities decide on the accepted uses for a specific plot and building in their urban planning (usually through differentiating zones based on uses), which normally includes groups of entire city blocks. In this regard, it seems clear that if tourism legislation generally accepts the ability to accommodate tourists in apartments, the council’s authority to zone land and establish differentiated areas would be clearly harmed or undercut. The reason being that the council would, for example, no longer be able to establish exclusive residential zones or plots, as the buildings constructed in these areas or on those plots of land could accommodate both tourists and residents alike. This means that there would be an inevitable mix of residential and tourist accommodation purposes, without the council being able to separate one from the other. As I have stated, this hypothesis fails to recognise the authority of councils to plan their territory (art. 25.2.a of the Act regulating the Basis of Local Government) by mandating uses and distributing them orderly by zones. e) expanding this arrangement has led to a considerable rise in the sale and rental prices for homes There is a clear agreement that expanding the arrangement of homes for tourist use is leading to a considerable increase in the sale and rental prices for residential homes in general. By way of example, the selling price for homes in the Balearic Islands is rising at an annual rate of 7.4%, making the islands, alongside Madrid and Catalonia, one of the regions with the highest rises in property values in Spain, according to data released by the National Statistics Institute (INE) in September 2017. The 7.4% hike seen in the Balearic Islands is only surpassed by the 10.9% rise in Madrid and the 9.3% increase in Catalonia. This means that these three