The Valencia City Council has announced the first closures due to the cessation of activity of illegal tourist apartments. This was announced in the last plenary session by the Councilor for Urban Planning and Housing, Juan Giner, who framed this action in the campaign of inspections carried out to denounce the illegal use of housing as tourist apartments.
At the beginning of the legislature, the new mayor, María José Catalá, already announced that one of the priorities of her mandate would be to end the proliferation of tourist apartments. A growing phenomenon.
The latest known data indicates that in the month of March the figure of more than 10,000 tourist apartments has already been exceeded, according to data from Visit València, with an increase of 38.6% in the city as a whole. These figures are beginning to be worrying not only in the most touristy neighborhoods in the historic center or close to the beaches; In the peripheral neighborhoods the number of tourist apartments has grown by 67% in the last year.
A circumstance that was the protagonist of last Tuesday’s plenary session. During its celebration, the Councilor for Urban Planning announced that the City Council is studying modifying the urban planning of Valencia with the aim of restricting, “with legal certainty and well-defined regulations”, the proliferation of tourist apartments. An idea that would follow in the footsteps of the announcement made by the mayor of Madrid, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, who indicated that the City Council that he presides has decided to suspend the granting of new licenses for housing for tourist use in the city.
In his speech, Juan Giner highlighted that the City Council will continue to intensify inspections and complaints of illegal apartments and highlighted that “in just four months the Local Police has filed 166 complaints against owners of illegal apartments, more than double those filed in all of 2022, when only 73 complaints were filed.”
Municipal sources clarified to La Vanguardia that, for the moment, the orders to cease activity have been initiated so it is not yet clear whether these 166 will end up being executed as closures.
