Barcelona City Council inspectors uncovered a complex of at least 31 illegal tourist apartments set up at number 441 Travessera de Gràcia, just a few meters from the modernist complex of Sant Pau hospital. “Ours, if we’re lucky, is twenty square meters – a few clients explained this Friday at the entrance of the building –. The truth is, it’s the shabbiest place I’ve ever stayed.” “Are they illegal apartments? I’m not surprised! – others added – we thought we were booking a kind of apart-hotel, but apart from the cleaning staff, there’s no one here in charge of anything.” “We made the reservation through Booking, and then they tried to charge us some very strange supplements.”
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The Deputy Mayor for Urban Planning, the socialist Laia Bonet, detailed that this building has 19 tourist apartment licenses. These permits always refer to very specific properties. One cannot alter their characteristics lightly. “The problem is that those responsible for these 19 licensed apartments, each about 60 square meters, carried out a series of works without the corresponding permits from the City Council to divide most of them into a lot of small apartments. We have already opened seven sanctioning files on this property. Each of them can lead to fines of between 60,000 and 600,000 euros. We are also processing another thirteen files aimed at reversing the illegal works carried out.”
An anonymous citizen complaint led to these investigations. However, the City Council inspectors’ inquiries are still open. So far, these municipal investigators have been able to confirm the presence of tourists in 26 segregated apartments and in another four homes that lack the pertinent license. In addition, inspectors detected exaggerated overcrowding in a home that does have a tourist license. But given the practical divisions, everything indicates that the number of irregular accommodations in this property is even higher. City Council inspectors have not yet been able to access several very suspicious dependencies in this building.
In fact, in this building, only one home operates in a conventional way. Apparently, it is a very elderly couple who yesterday refused to comment on what is happening on their staircase. A hotel also operates on the upper floors. City Council investigators understand that this establishment has nothing to do with this scheme of illegal tourist apartments. Those in charge of this business also declined to speak about the matter. The fact is that in the surroundings, some neighbors and merchants indicated that yes, this building has been mainly dedicated to tourist accommodation for years, but none of these neighbors and merchants were aware of the transformation of the licensed apartments into a string of illegal apartments.
Historically, the main groups dedicated to illegal tourist accommodation in Barcelona usually rent homes and then sublet them for entire days or by rooms, usually until the owner manages to evict them. Foreigners are abundant among them because people from outside can hide their tracks more easily. Other multi-offenders, however, are local people who try to exploit their properties to the maximum. Dividing a home into apartments is a common practice. Deputy Mayor Bonet also pointed out that in this case, everything indicates that those responsible for all these illegal mini-apartments are the same. “It seems there is a clear link between all of them.” Now the task is to identify the mastermind behind this scheme.
Since 2018, the City Council has revoked 202 tourist apartment licenses due to regulatory non-compliance related, among other things, to habitability conditions or unauthorized segregation processes. Last year, the City Council carried out 8,500 inspections, which resulted in 577 sanctioning files and 849 restitution files. So far this year, 3,156 inspections have been carried out, with 282 sanctioning files and 192 restitution files. In this way, over the last ten years, the City Council has recovered more than 6,600 illegal tourist apartments that have returned to the residential market.
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Municipal inspections and the fines they entail always easily intimidated individuals who carried out these practices occasionally. These highly professional multi-offenders are another matter entirely. They always have specialized lawyers to prolong the processes opened against them to exhaustion and before an administrative contentious court.
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