Spain’s housing crisis: Key issues behind Maricarmen protests

Images of María del Carmen Abascal, known as Maricarmen, being evicted from her home in Madrid have become the latest symbol of Spain’s housing crisis.

The 87-year-old woman had been renting the property for around 70 years. According to the Madrid Tenants’ Union, following a change of ownership there was a proposed rent increase from about 500 euros to 2,650 euros a month, later reduced to 1,650.

After several attempts to halt the process, Maricarmen was evicted and later taken to hospital. The case triggered protests that quickly spread beyond Madrid.

But the scale of the reaction is hard to understand if you look only at this isolated incident.

Maricarmen’s case comes at a time when access to housing has become one of the main economic pressures on many Spanish households.

How much have housing prices risen in Spain?

Purchase prices are currently growing at double-digit rates. The Housing Price Index of the National Statistics Institute (INE) recorded a 12.2% year-on-year increase in the second quarter of 2026.

Second-hand homes, which make up most of the Spanish market, became even more expensive, by 12.9%, while new housing rose by 7.4%. Compared with the previous quarter, prices climbed another 3.4%.

The problem does not just affect those looking to buy. The average advertised rent reached 15.1 euros per square metre in August 2026, according to Idealista, 5.8% more than a year earlier. And these rises add to the increases recorded in recent years.

The result is that the cost of housing is absorbing a large share of the income of many households, especially among those who rent.

According to INE data, in 2024, 28.1% of people renting a home at market rates were spending more than 40% of their disposable income on housing costs. The European Union average was 19.2%.

So the affordability problem is not simply that homes are more expensive. For a significant share of tenants, keeping a home consumes a very high proportion of their income.

Why have prices and rents risen so much?

Experts stress that there is no single explanation, but a fundamental imbalance lies behind the current situation. In the places where most people want or need to live, not enough housing is being built to absorb demand.

Spain continues to gain population and create new households, while housing construction remains far below the levels recorded before the financial crisis.

The Bank of Spain has repeatedly highlighted the supply deficit as one of the main factors pushing up the market, especially in the most economically dynamic areas, where population and employment have grown the most.

This makes an important distinction necessary. Spain does not literally lack housing across all its territory. There are municipalities with stagnant populations and empty properties. The problem is where those homes are.

Pressure is particularly concentrated in Madrid, Barcelona, the islands, much of the Mediterranean coast and other major urban and tourist centres. An empty home in a municipality with little economic activity does not solve the shortage of flats in Madrid, Málaga, Barcelona or Palma.

Why doesn’t Spain build more homes?

Part of the answer lies in the consequences of the previous property crisis. Before 2008, Spain experienced a huge construction boom fuelled by cheap credit. The bursting of the bubble led to the disappearance of numerous developers, problems in the banking system and a collapse in construction activity.

Residential building later recovered but never returned to those levels. This also helps to explain why today’s market differs significantly from the one that preceded the financial crisis.

The Bank of Spain notes that the production of new housing remains much more moderate than during previous boom cycles and that the supply shortfall is concentrated in certain areas.

On top of that, building housing takes time. Converting land, obtaining planning permits, securing financing and putting up a building can take years. The property supply therefore responds slowly when a city’s population rises rapidly, and that slow response has consequences for prices.

If tens of thousands of people need additional housing in a given area but the housing stock barely increases, competition for the existing properties intensifies.

What role do investment funds and big landlords play?

Ownership of rental housing is also more concentrated than the image of the small landlord with a single flat to let might suggest.

According to a report by the Ministry of Consumer Affairs in collaboration with the CSIC, only 39% of regular rental homes are owned by individuals who have a single property for rent. The remaining 61% belongs to individual multi-landlords (owners with two or more homes let), legal entities, including companies and funds, and public bodies.

The concentration is also visible if you look only at individual owners. 52.8% of homes rented out by private individuals belong to landlords who have two or more properties on the rental market.

The phenomenon is particularly marked in some of the cities where housing prices are highest. Among homes rented out by individuals, those held by multi-landlords account for 60.8% in Barcelona, 56.4% in Madrid and 55% in Valencia.

Moreover, the stock held by multi-landlords has grown more quickly. Between 2016 and 2023, homes rented out by individuals with two or more properties increased by 39.9%, compared with 30.4% among owners with a single home for rent.

But who owns the housing is only one part of the equation. The other lies in how many people and households are competing for a supply that is growing more slowly.

What role does population growth play?

Spain is approaching 50 million inhabitants after several years of strong demographic growth, driven mainly by immigration. This growth expands the active population, the number of workers and demand for goods and services, but it also increases the need for housing.

Furthermore, to understand the property market, the number of households matters as much as the number of inhabitants. A couple who split up and then need two homes, young people leaving the family home or workers moving to another city create new households even if the total population barely changes.

When the number of households grows more quickly than the available housing stock, competition for homes increases. This phenomenon is particularly visible in major employment centres such as Madrid, where new residents, workers, students, families and young people wanting to move out compete for limited supply.

What about foreign buyers and tourist rentals?

Both factors play a role, but their weight varies enormously depending on the place. Tourist rentals can reduce the supply available for residential renting in neighbourhoods with strong visitor demand, especially in big cities, the islands and some coastal destinations.

International demand also has considerable weight in the sales market. According to the College of Registrars, foreign buyers accounted for 15.98% of home purchases in Spain in the second quarter of 2026, the highest share recorded to date. Their presence is particularly high in the Balearic Islands, where they represented 32.27% of transactions, and in the Valencia region, with 31.03%.

But talking about “foreign buyers” covers very different realities. The nationalities most present in the Spanish market as a whole continue to be mainly European and Moroccan. Data from the Registrars for 2025 placed British, German, Dutch, Moroccan, Romanian, French and Italian buyers among the main foreign nationalities.

Latin American demand is also there, although its weight is smaller than that of European buyers. According to the College of Registrars, purchasers from South America accounted for 5% of acquisitions made by foreigners in the first quarter of 2025. Their presence may also be more significant in certain local markets.

Social housing

There is another important feature of the Spanish market: the stock of social rental housing is very small compared with other European countries.

According to the European Commission, homes reserved for social purposes account for around 1.5% to 1.7% of the housing stock in Spain, compared with an average of between 6% and 7% in the European Union.

This means that a larger share of low and middle-income households depend directly on the private market. In countries with a broader stock of social housing, more of the population can access rentals whose price does not depend exclusively on market conditions.

In Spain, when private rents rise rapidly, there is only a relatively small public stock able to absorb households that can no longer afford them.

Young people

One of the clearest indicators of the difficulties in accessing housing lies, paradoxically, outside the property market itself: many young people simply do not manage to get into it. In 2025, 44.3% of Spaniards aged between 26 and 34 were still living with their parents, one of the highest shares in Europe.

Among them, almost half (47.3%) said that the main reason was that they could not afford to buy or rent a home. And among people of all ages who had looked for another home but ultimately did not move, almost seven out of ten cited excessive prices as the main obstacle.

This helps to explain why the debate on housing affects very different generations. Young people struggle to move out. Tenants face high rents. Families compete for larger homes. And some older tenants can find themselves in vulnerable situations when the ownership or the contractual conditions of their homes change.

Why has Maricarmen’s case prompted such a reaction?

Maricarmen’s story brings many of these tensions together in a single case. It is not a young person trying to enter the property market for the first time, but an 87-year-old woman who had spent approximately seven decades living in the same home.

Her eviction has therefore put the spotlight on another dimension of the housing crisis: residential insecurity does not only affect those who are looking for a flat or trying to move out, but also people who have been renting for decades when the ownership or the conditions of their contracts change.

The specific circumstances of the case have also generated a political dispute. The central government, the Madrid regional administration, the city council, the owner and tenants’ organisations have disagreed over who is responsible and what measures could have been taken to avoid the eviction.

Amnesty International has argued that evicting Maricarmen without providing her with an adequate housing alternative violated her rights, while the different authorities have blamed each other for what happened.

But the protests have gone beyond Maricarmen’s individual case. Her eviction has taken place at a time when buying a home is becoming ever more expensive, rents keep rising and a significant share of households are struggling with these costs.

The demonstrations have therefore turned an individual case into a symbol of a collective problem. Maricarmen’s circumstances are exceptional, as few people spend seven decades in the same rented home, but the context in which her eviction is taking place is not.