The Seville City Council (PP) has already cut off the water supply six times in the last year to irregular tourist apartments in the historic centre, after successive breaches of the law. This drastic measure has led to the closure of the apartments, which some owners have tried to reverse without success. Three owners of the six apartments have appealed the water cut-off in court, but the court has upheld the closure, finding the resolution proportionate, motivated by complaints from neighbours, fed up with the noise and bustle of tourists.
The Andalusian capital’s City Council intends to increase its tourist police to impose a firm hand and reverse the red carpet given during the last decade to tourist apartments, which are increasing in parallel with the rise in hotels that are flooding the city. “One of the owners claimed that his apartment was a home, but with the evidence provided by the Local Police, the judge ruled in our favour,” say sources from the municipal Urban Planning Department. The water cut-off is supported by the legal services of the City Council, but also by two reports from external law firms that have considered the measure legal.
Meanwhile, the touristification of Seville, with so many visitors concentrated in the old town and Triana, sometimes turns into tourismophobia, as happened last Tuesday in Santa Cruz, the neighbourhood with the most tourist apartments in Spain, where a neighbour threw a bucket of water at a group of British tourists who had arrived in Cadiz by cruise ship. “I understand part of the annoyance. With so much crowding and groups of tourists, free tours screaming at midnight (…) but throwing a bucket of water is not the solution,” he told Seville Diary the group’s guide, Mercedes Míguez.
The Seville City Council wants to limit the problem because it estimates that there are 5,000 illegal apartments in the city, which add to the 10,000 that it has registered. That is, one in three apartments is illegal, according to the Council, which hopes that the increase in inspections will have a deterrent effect in the coming years, because at the current rate the Local Police force would take a decade to inspect them all. In the six tourist apartments closed so far, the water supply will not be restored until the Urban Planning Department closes the open files and they return to being private homes. The caps on the digital meters are not easy to circumvent and the public company Emasesa checks whether there is consumption in the closed apartments, according to the Management.
In parallel, other cities such as Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Santiago de Compostela and Alicante reject the measure of cutting off water to non-compliant owners. Cadiz proposes charging an extra water fee and Malaga a new tax on tourists who live in apartments to increase social services and help vulnerable families affected by the unstoppable rise in rental prices.
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“If Emasesa detected movements, the neighbours would raise the alarm because they are the ones who reported the noise and they are very well trained in the matter. We have carried out the last three cuts since January in the Alameda de Hércules, the commercial area and the one that borders the Jewish quarter. [Santa Cruz]“We are not going to let tourists leave the city without a permit,” explains Pedro Pujol, one of the only two agents specialised in the fight against illegal apartments in the Tourist Police unit. 57,000 residents live in the heart of the third Spanish city that received the most tourists in 2022 with 3.4 million, according to a study with data from the INE. Every week, the most fed up Sevillians file an average of 10 complaints to achieve the closure of the tourist apartments that bother them, either due to lack of documentation, a shortage of bathrooms or because they are higher than a first floor and have a license after July 2022. In the last decade, 3,400 citizens threw in the towel and left the historic centre because of mass tourism.
Since the Law to Promote the Sustainability of the Territory of Andalusia (LISTA) last January gave the City Councils the power to impose their restrictions on touristification, many Seville owners have been afraid: since then the Junta has received the registration of three apartments as tourist housing every day, which adds up to about 700 new apartments registered in the capital, municipal sources confirm. However, in Seville the date of the start of activity of the apartments in the registry must be before July 7, 2022 in order to survive. “They exploit them illegally while we don’t catch them,” Pujol confides. To increase control, the Andalusian law established that since yesterday, after a period of six months from its entry into force, the operating companies are the ones that must appear in the Junta’s registry and not the owners, since there have been cases of untraceable owners in regions such as California and different European countries.
The Seville City Council claims that it has been “very prudent” in regularising its restrictions after the courts struck down municipal regulations on the matter, as was the case in Córdoba. A turning point was the judicial victory in the High Court of Justice of Andalusia (TSJA) on its modification of article 44 of the PGOU after the appeals of the owners of tourist apartments.
Despite the caution of the Andalusian City Council, it was this summer that the measure to cut off water to owners of offending flats came to light. Most Spanish cities do not look favourably on the measure.
Madrid was the first to speak out against it: “I understand the situation in Seville, but it is not the Madrid model,” said Mayor José Luis Rodríguez Almeida (PP), who advocates a moratorium on licences to discourage and an increase in inspections. Barcelona says that “such a measure is not on the table.” The Catalan capital will double the resources allocated to inspections in 2025 to prevent illegal activity from growing before all current licences expire in 2028, and highlights that it has recovered 3,473 flats that were operating illegal tourist activity for regular residential use.
Neither Valencia, Alicante or Santiago de Compostela are considering the possibility of cutting off water to illegal flats. In Cadiz, the new mayor Bruno Garcia (PP) will raise the water rate for tourist homes, so that they will soon have to pay for water in the sections that are applied to commercial-industrial uses. In Malaga, its mayor, Francisco de la Torre, has proposed the implementation of a rate per night to tax tourist homes. He has done so by passing the ball to the Government, after writing a letter to the Minister of Industry and Tourism, Jordi Hereu, in which he proposes a legislative initiative to promote the measure and then “the municipalities that consider it appropriate” establish this tourist tax. Its revenue, according to the mayor, should be allocated to rents for families in a situation of social exclusion, but also to the promotion of quality tourism.
In Seville, the president of the Sppme union of the Local Police, Luis Val, clarifies about the work of the Tourist Police, made up of 20 agents: “The problem is when they don’t pay attention, months go by and we check the reservation on the internet, then Urbanismo decrees the water cut off for reiteration and disobedience, provided that there are individual meters so as not to harm other neighbors, of course.”
Complaints about the touristification of the centre of Seville skyrocketed during the pandemic when young people rented tourist apartments to celebrate endless parties without the Local Police being able to stop them. This led to complaints about noise and then in 2022 the owners needed to change the use of the land from residential to tertiary use for lodging, a measure reinforced by the Junta last January. Now, with 15,000 homes in the centre and Triana, Seville is trying to keep the glass from overflowing, although the tap is still open.
With information from Ferran Bono, Rafa Burgos, Silvia R. Pontevedra, Jesus A. Canas and Nacho Sanchez.
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