Throughout the year and not only in summer, it is very common to see groups of tourists entering with their belongings and suitcases in farms and flats in the neighborhood of El Carme, Russafa or the Mercat. As this newspaper explained, the capital of Turia recorded 72,370 nights of accommodation in legal tourist apartments in June, according to INE calculations, to which stays in illegal establishments would have to be added. Given the proliferation of the latter, the Valencia City Council has decided to act after the change of government on 28-M.
According to the figures detailed yesterday by the mayoress, the popular María Jose Catalá, in Valencia there are “some 4,000 irregular tourist apartments” throughout the city. Given these figures, the mayor announced the approval of an ordinance and the implementation of a plan to detect irregular tourist apartments.
“An ordinance must be approved and we have already started to do it and we are going to prepare an inspection plan to detect apartments that are irregular,” declared the mayoress during her visit to the Central Fire Park.
Faced with requests from the opposition to approve a moratorium on tourist apartments, Catalá counterattacked and blamed the previous government team of Compromís and PSPV for “only closing 24 files of irregular activities during the months of January to April, when the number of irregular tourist apartments amounts to about 4,000 in Valencia”.
Catalá affirmed that “it could evaluate the implementation of moratoriums, but it is more important to prepare an inspection plan for irregular activity, since the moratorium will not help because the irregular activity will continue. In other words, legal activity will be stopped, but illegal activity will not be stopped.”
In this sense, he emphasized that the priority at this time “is that there are no irregular apartments and, from there, prevent tourist apartments from generating a massive presence in some neighborhoods of the city and making coexistence difficult.” Catalá made it clear that for his government “legal security, coexistence and, above all, the right to rest of the neighbors are priorities.”
Lastly, the mayoress acknowledged the existence of a large number of ground-floor tourist apartments and commercial premises in the Marítimo area and replied that it will be verified that they “adjust to the urban regulations of the area because everything that is outside the norm will undergo an inspection and an order to close this activity”.