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-access crisis.
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The 87-year-old had been renting the property for around 70 years. According to the Tenants’ Union of Madrid, after a change of ownership the new landlord proposed raising the rent from around 500 euros to 2,650 euros a month, later reducing it to 1,650 euros.
After several attempts to halt the eviction, Maricarmen was finally removed from the flat and later taken to hospital. The case triggered protests that quickly spread beyond Madrid.
Yet the scale of the reaction is hard to understand by looking at this eviction alone. Maricarmen’s case comes at a time when access to housing has become one of the main financial pressures on many Spanish households.
How much have housing prices risen in Spain?
Purchase prices are currently rising 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, rising by 12.9%, while new-build homes increased by 7.4%. Compared with just the previous quarter, prices climbed another 3.4%.
The problem does not only 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 increases come on top of the rises seen in recent years.
The result is that housing costs absorb a large share of many households’ income, especially for those renting.
INE data show that 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 sizeable share of tenants, keeping a roof over their heads 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 created to absorb demand.
Spain continues to gain population and create new households, while homebuilding remains far below the levels recorded before the financial crisis.
The Bank of Spain has repeatedly highlighted the shortage of supply as one of the main factors pushing up the market, especially in the most dynamic economic 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 located.
Pressure is particularly intense in Madrid, Barcelona, the islands, much of the Mediterranean coast and other large 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 simply build more homes?
Part of the answer lies in the legacy of the previous property crisis. Before 2008, Spain went through a huge construction boom fuelled by cheap credit. When the bubble burst, many developers disappeared, the banking system ran into trouble and building activity collapsed.
Residential construction later recovered, but never returned to those levels. This also helps explain why today’s market differs significantly from the one that preceded the financial crisis. The Bank of Spain notes that the output of new housing remains far more moderate than in previous boom cycles and that the shortage of supply is particularly concentrated in certain areas.
On top of that, building homes takes time. Rezoning land, securing planning permission, obtaining finance and putting up a block of flats can take years. The housing supply therefore responds slowly when a city’s population rises quickly, and that slow response feeds through into prices.
If tens of thousands of people need extra housing in a given area but the stock of homes barely grows, competition for the existing properties intensifies.
What role do investment funds and large landlords play?
Ownership of rental housing is also more concentrated than the common image of a small landlord with a single let would suggest.
According to a report by the Ministry of Consumer Affairs together with the CSIC, only 39% of homes used as main residences and rented out are owned by individuals with just one property on the rental market. The remaining 61% belongs to individual multi-landlords (owners with two or more rental homes), legal entities, including companies and funds, and public bodies.
The concentration is also clear if we look only at private landlords. Some 52.8% of rental properties owned by individuals belong to landlords with two or more homes on the market.
The trend is particularly visible in some of the cities where housing is most expensive. Among rental homes owned 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, rental homes owned by individuals with two or more properties rose by 39.9%, compared with a 30.4% increase among landlords with just one rental home.
But who owns the homes is only part of the equation. The other part is 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 working-age population, the number of workers and demand for goods and services, but it also increases the need for housing.
In addition, when it comes to understanding the housing market, the number of households matters as much as the total population. A couple who split up and each need a separate home, young people leaving the family house or workers moving to another city all create new households even if the overall population barely changes.
When the number of households rises faster than the available housing stock, competition for homes increases. This is particularly evident in major employment hubs such as Madrid, where new residents, workers, students, families and young people looking to move out of their parents’ homes compete for limited supply.
What about foreign buyers and holiday rentals?
Both factors play a part, but their weight varies hugely depending on the location. Tourist rentals can reduce the supply available for long-term residential lettings in neighbourhoods with strong visitor demand, especially in large cities, the islands and some coastal destinations.
International demand also carries significant 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 so far. Their presence is particularly strong in the Balearic Islands, where they made up 32.27% of transactions, and in the Valencian Community, with 31.03%.
However, talking about “foreign buyers” covers very different realities. The nationalities most prominent across the Spanish market are still mainly European and Moroccan. Data from the Registrars for 2025 ranked British, German, Dutch, Moroccan, Romanian, French and Italian nationals among the main groups of foreign buyers.
Latin American demand is also present, although its weight is smaller than that of European buyers. According to the College of Registrars, buyers from South America accounted for 5% of foreign purchases in the first quarter of 2025. Their presence may also be more significant in certain local markets.
The limited stock of 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 earmarked for social purposes represent around 1.5% to 1.7% of the housing stock in Spain, compared with an EU average of between 6% and 7%.
This means a larger share of low and middle-income households depend directly on the private market. In countries with a bigger stock of social housing, more people can access rentals whose price does not depend solely on market conditions.
In Spain, when private rents rise rapidly, there is only a relatively small public housing sector able to absorb the households that can no longer afford them.
Young people show another side of the problem
One of the clearest indicators of the difficulties in accessing housing is, paradoxically, outside the housing market itself: many young people simply never manage to enter 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 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 in ten cited excessive prices as the main obstacle.
This helps explain why the housing debate cuts across generations. Young people struggle to move out and live independently. Tenants face high rents. Families compete for larger homes. And some older tenants may find themselves in vulnerable situations when the ownership or contractual terms of their homes change.
Why has Maricarmen’s case prompted so much mobilisation?
Maricarmen’s story concentrates many of these tensions in a single case. This is not a young person trying to enter the housing market for the first time, but a woman of 87 who had spent roughly seven decades living in the same home.
Her eviction has highlighted another dimension of the housing crisis: residential insecurity does not only affect those looking for a flat or trying to move out of the family home, but also people who have rented for decades when the ownership of their building or the terms of their contracts change.
The specific circumstances of the case have also sparked a political dispute. The central government, the Madrid regional authority, the city council, the property owner and tenants’ organisations have disagreed over who bears responsibility and which measures could have been taken to prevent the eviction.
Amnesty International has argued that evicting Maricarmen without providing her with suitable alternative accommodation violated her rights, while the different authorities have blamed one another 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 increasingly expensive, rents keep rising and a large share of households struggle to meet these costs.
The demonstrations have thus turned an individual case into a symbol of a collective problem. Maricarmen’s circumstances are unusual, as few people spend seven decades in the same rented home, but the wider context in which her eviction is taking place is not.
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