The Xunta validates 200 tourist apartments in the historic center of Santiago despite the fact that municipal regulations prohibit them since 2015

The city council of Santiago de Compostela has sent a formal request to the Xunta de Galicia to remove from the Registry of Tourist Companies and Activities (REAT) all those tourist homes that do not comply with municipal regulations. Only in the historic center of the city, declared a World Heritage Site, and where this activity has been prohibited since 2015, more than 200 appear, something easily verifiable ex officio because their address is listed on all of them. Although the council claimed to start the process within a period of fifteen days, a month after the request there is still no response. For a practice similar to that attributed to the regional administration—refusing to remove unlicensed apartments from its website—the Ministry of Consumer Affairs has opened a file against Airbnb that could result in a fine of up to 100,000 euros for the company.

The request, the content of which elDiario.es has had access to, is signed by the Councilor for Urban Planning, Iago Lestegás. In it, there is an exhaustive review of the measures taken by the Compostela city council during the last decade, with governments of three different parties – none of them the PP -, to put a stop to the proliferation of housing for tourist use (VUTs) and that, as indicated, the Galician Tourism Agency, responsible for the REAT, had necessary knowledge; so far, without any results.

Each of the regulatory modifications with which Compostela Aberta, PSOE and, now, the bipartite BNG-CA, were restricting the creation of VUT were met with great media echo, but were also published in official newspapers, such as the Official Gazette of the Province or the Official Gazette of Galicia, and some of them were even communicated to the Galician Planning Registry. Even so, time and time again, as stated in the document, the Galician Tourism Agency continued to register homes in the REAT, both in the scope of action of the Special Plan of the historic city – where they were directly prohibited – and in other areas. areas of the municipality in which they can be located as long as they meet certain requirements. Several hundred of those registered do not do so.

Lestegás, “reiterating what has already been stated on numerous occasions,” insists that the activity of these VUTs may have one of the requirements, the regional one, but it does not comply with urban planning legality, which is the responsibility of the city council only. The councilor uses jurisprudence to support that a tourist accommodation carries out an economic activity and for this, prior communication to the council is essential, which will be the one to authorize it if it does not contravene the regulations. “The Galician Tourism Agency, in the procedure regulated in articles 39 et seq., relating to housing for tourist use (VUT) and its activity regime, must verify that the destination as a VUT is not prohibited by the regulation of uses of the sector”, the Superior Court of Xustiza of Galicia argued before the appeal of an individual for his exclusion from the REAT.

Decree 12/2017 of the complete to be effective. Immediately afterwards, in article 42, it clarifies that this declaration does not exempt from complying with the rest of the obligations required in other regulations. Therefore, Lestegás considers that what it claims is a simple process of applying the law, without the need for any subjective judgment: it is only necessary to verify that any of the necessary requirements for the start of activity are missing.

With this argument, already in November 2022, the Compostela city council – then governed by the PSOE – sent a first request to Tourism in which it requested “the deregistration of the VUTs lacking a municipal enabling title of an urban nature and canceling their registration in the REAT.” The Xunta’s response, then, was that it should only do so when a court ruling confirmed this illegality. Last July, he assured that the town councils were in charge of checking whether each home does not comply with their regulations or not. If not, he explained to this editorial team, it is the council that has to communicate the case to Turismo de Galicia “so that we can proceed with the withdrawal file, with a hearing for the parties.” To do this, it was necessary to provide “a legal basis that supports the cancellation of the requested registration.” At the time of closing this information, he had not responded to elDiario.es’ questions about the new requirement.

The monthly updates of the REAT allow us to check the evolution of the tourist rental offer in Santiago since, in June 2023, the regulations on VUTs were finalized with the approval of the ordinance that closed the door to the regularization of the pre-existing apartments that had been operating illegally.

At that time, the number of homes designated for this purpose in the municipal area was 819; Today there are 752, a decrease of around 8% and which is doubled in the historic city: from 250 they have fallen to 210 in half a year. Still, they are still more than a quarter of the total.

Municipal sources attribute this decrease, mainly, to the decision of the owners to return to the traditional market, after being informed that they would not be able to continue with their activity, and not so much to the action of the Xunta, which has resulted in a very small number of casualties, always after a court ruling. The proof, those hundreds of VUTs that, despite not complying with the legislation, are still registered in their census.