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

The 87-year-old had been renting the property for around 70 years. According to the Madrid Tenants’ Union, after a change of ownership a rent increase was proposed from around 500 euros to 2.650 euros a month, later reduced to 1.650.

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

Yet the scale of the reaction is hard to understand if you look only at this eviction. 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 house 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 housing, which makes up most of the Spanish market, became even more expensive, up 12,9%, while new housing rose 7,4%. Compared with the previous quarter alone, prices increased by another 3,4%.

The problem does not only affect those who want 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 build on the increases recorded in recent years.

The result is that housing costs absorb a large share of the income of many households, especially 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%.

The accessibility problem therefore 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 there is a fundamental imbalance 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 seen before the financial crisis.

The Bank of Spain has repeatedly pointed to the supply shortfall as one of the main sources of pressure on the market, especially in the most economically dynamic areas, where population and employment have grown most.

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

Pressure is concentrated particularly 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 just build more homes?

Part of the answer lies in the consequences of the previous property boom. Before 2008, Spain experienced a huge construction surge 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 building activity.

Residential construction 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 in previous expansionary cycles and that the supply shortfall is concentrated particularly in certain areas.

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

If tens of thousands of people need additional housing in a given area but the residential stock barely increases, 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 image of the small landlord with a single rented flat would suggest.

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

The concentration is also evident if we look only at individual owners. 52,8% of the homes rented out by natural persons belong to landlords who have two or more properties for rent.

The phenomenon is particularly visible in some of the cities where housing prices are highest. Among homes rented out by individuals, those owned 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 rapidly. 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 rental home.

But who owns the homes is only one part of the equation. The other 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. That growth has positive economic effects: it increases the labour force, consumption and the number of workers.

But it also raises the need for housing. And to understand the housing market, both the number of inhabitants and the number of households matter. A couple who split up and then need two homes, young people leaving the family home or workers moving to another city all create new households even if the total population barely changes.

When the number of households grows faster than the available housing stock, competition for homes increases. This phenomenon is particularly visible in major employment hubs such as Madrid, where new residents, workers, students, families and young people seeking independence compete for a limited supply.

What about foreign buyers and holiday rentals?

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

International demand also carries considerable weight in the sales market. According to the Colegio de Registradores, 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 made up 32,27% of transactions, and in the Valencian Community, with 31,03%.

But talking about “foreign buyers” covers very different realities. The nationalities most present in the Spanish market as a whole are still mainly European and Moroccan. Registradores data for 2025 put Britons, Germans, Dutch nationals, Moroccans, Romanians, French and Italians among the main nationalities of foreign buyers.

The arrival of Latin American populations is also part of the demographic backdrop of recent years, with communities such as the Venezuelan one increasingly settled in Spain. In 2025, 36.271 people of Venezuelan origin acquired Spanish nationality, the third most frequent origin among new citizens, after Morocco and Colombia, according to the National Statistics Institute (INE).

Spain’s limited social housing stock

There is another important feature of the Spanish market: the stock of social rental housing is small compared with that of other European countries. Public or social rental housing accounts for less than 2% of Spain’s residential stock, compared with roughly 8% across the European Union, according to figures cited in the debate stirred by the current protests.

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, a greater proportion of the population can access rents whose level does not depend exclusively on market conditions.

In Spain, when private rents rise rapidly, there is only a relatively small public stock capable of absorbing 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 lies, paradoxically, outside the housing market itself: many young people simply do not 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 proportions in Europe.

Among them, almost half (47,3%) said their 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 affects very different generations. Young people struggle to move out. Tenants face high rents. Families compete for larger homes. And some older tenants may find themselves in vulnerable situations when ownership changes or the contractual conditions of their homes change.

Why has Maricarmen’s case sparked so much mobilisation?

Maricarmen’s story brings many of these tensions together in a single case. This is not a young person trying to access the housing market for the first time, but a woman of 87 who had spent around seven decades living in the same home.

Her eviction has therefore shone a light on another dimension of the housing crisis: residential insecurity does not only affect those looking for a flat or trying to become independent, but also people who have been renting for decades when the ownership or the terms 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 property owner and tenants’ organisations have disagreed over who was responsible and over what measures could have been taken to prevent the eviction.

Amnesty International has argued that evicting Maricarmen without providing her with suitable alternative housing 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 occurred at a time when buying a home is becoming increasingly expensive, rents continue to rise and a significant proportion of households are struggling to meet these costs.

The protests have thus turned an individual case into a symbol of a collective problem. Maricarmen’s circumstances are exceptional, since few people spend seven decades in the same rental home, but the context in which her eviction has taken place is not.

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