Madrid says goodbye this January to the so-called Covid terraces, located in parking lots, after having been installed to facilitate the activity of bars and restaurants in the capital due to the pandemic as an exceptional measure by the City Council. Hoteliers who do not remove them may receive fines. The opposition requests that benches or leisure areas for children be installed in that space.
These terraces had to stop providing service to customers as of January 1, 2024, although they had this month of margin for their dismantling.
The Madrid Terraces ordinance contemplated being able to maintain terraces in parking strips in 2022 and 2023, with closing hours until midnight and delimiting their space visibly with barriers or high-intensity reflectors.
However, those located in special acoustic protection zones (ZPAE) or those areas that were declared ‘saturated’ had to be removed. If they were located in environmentally protected zones (ZAP), the district could reduce their capacity proportionally up to 40% occupancy of the parking strips.
The modification of the 2013 Hospitality and Restaurant Terraces and Kiosks Ordinance came into force on February 1, 2022. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the Madrid City Council, through the Hospitality and Restaurant Terraces commission, adopted a series of extraordinary measures to facilitate the installation and expansion of terraces with the purpose of helping the hospitality industry, seriously affected by the crisis, and facilitating safer outdoor leisure.
More than 2,000 extensions of sidewalk terraces were authorized and the green light was given to new formulas that made it possible to install them in previously unexplored places such as dirt areas, interblock spaces or even in parking strips.
