Tourists are still merrily going in and out of the large complex of illegal tourist flats in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter. The City Council announced yesterday that it is finalizing a penalty of 420,000 euros against the owner of number 24 on Carrer Ample for renting out most of his apartments by the day and without any type of permit, and on top of that in a repeated and systematic manner. The large fine, however, does not seem to have deterred the owner of this farm. There are fourteen floors of about 150 m2 each conveniently divided in order to accommodate the more tourists the better. In reality, it is a pioneer of these activities. Municipal inspectors have been investigating these practices since 2018. That year La Vanguardia also explained the plight of the last residents of this building.
A few residents on this side of the Gothic Quarter say that they bought 24 a few decades ago. Back then, El Gòtic still seemed like a normal and ordinary neighborhood, and in this vertically owned estate, a teacher, a family of jewelers, Dr. Lluc and his daughters, who had many suitors, lived there with rental contracts mostly from old income. The truth is that all the neighbors knew each other, the children played on the landings, the doors of the houses were open… But little by little some died and others moved to properties with much fewer stairs. No elevator works here. From those bucolic times, the tenants of a couple of flats are barely left. This story also explains how the bombastic expulsion of residents from the neighborhoods takes place.
“Tourists began to be seen in this building around 2014”, they now explain in Carrer Ample. “Terrible people have always come, dwarfs who only came to the city to get drunk and make a fuss.” “It couldn’t be any other way. You read the comments of customers on the internet and they are all complaints about the dirt and the poor condition of the flats”. “The uproar is so great that the neighbors of the farms next door and in front also call the Urban Guard.” “Sometimes they put a gentleman sitting in a chair at the entrance to maintain some order at night.” “It’s been a while since City Council inspectors have been passing by here every two or three”. “Maybe they change their profile on the internet and things like that, to disguise it a little, but…”. “Christmas is being a joke, the tourist traffic is permanent!” “And all my life, always, if you say something to the owner, he tells you very bitterly that everything is the business of his tenants, that they are the ones who dedicate themselves to subletting the rooms to tourists, that they are deceiving him and getting into a lot of trouble”. “And we all believe everything!” “Yes, the supposed tenants were very impertinent, some even threatened you if you complained!”
But the City Council inspectors understand that these tenants are actually straw tenants, parts of a framework designed to hide the systematic nature of these real estate sales. “We are talking about a real scam perpetrated by an owner that is about to end thanks to a long and intense investigation by the Urban Guard and the management of the City Council’s inspection services – says Albert Batlle , deputy mayor of Security and councilor responsible for the district of Ciutat Vella–. They had everything very well set up, but every day we are better prepared to face them. This penalty is exemplary and is a warning to all those who are willing to do business with an irregular use of the home. These practices have no place in Barcelona. In addition to causing inconvenience, they contribute to the expulsion of residents from the neighborhoods”.
This stratagem complicates the work of the municipal inspectors, as they have to prove that the straw tenant is indeed straw, that he doesn’t live there, that he probably doesn’t even live in Barcelona, ??that he doesn’t do anything other than confuse In fact, this penalty of 420,000 euros, still pending, is the result of many years of investigations and suspicions, so much so that one ends up wondering if the Barcelona Council has all the necessary legal tools to combat this type of systematic multi-offenders. As soon as the files were one step away from being completed, the plot changed the owners of the flats in question and thus forced the municipal inspectors to restart the administrative process.
The strong pressure from City Council inspectors, especially the one exerted during the first term of mayor Ada Colau, faced the multitude of small individuals who were trying to pay their rent and get a few euros out of them through irregular subletting , many times occasional. But this same municipal pressure also led the most persistent and professional offenders to refine their techniques and act with increasing dissimulation.
Until recently, the most common method among the most organized criminals was to rent a property and then sublease it for days to tourists until the owner managed to get the property back. For some time now, however, City Council inspectors are increasingly encountering landlords who try to hide their dealings by signing long-term rental contracts with straw tenants.