Barcelona is switching off 10,101 tourist flats, and it commissioned a study of what that will cost

Most pages about where to sleep in Barcelona’s old city are a list of hotels with an affiliate link on each one. This is not that, because we do not sell rooms and would be bad at it.

What we can do is put the four municipal documents about this neighbourhood next to each other, which nobody seems to have done, and let you decide.

The date

From 2028, the 10,101 licensed tourist flats in Barcelona lose their licences.

That is not a rumour and it is not a proposal in a manifesto, and the figure is not one of those numbers that gets rounder every time somebody repeats it. It is in the Ajuntament’s own press office twice. The note of 27 June 2024 has the mayor and the housing minister standing in a public housing block in Trinitat talking about recovering fins a 10.101 habitatges d’ús turístic amb llicència que hi ha avui a la ciutat for ordinary residential use. The note of 9 August 2024, about inspections, repeats the number and adds the month the clock runs out: novembre de 2028, when s’hagin extingit totes les llicències dels més de 10.101 pisos turístics amb llicència a dia d’avui.

The study the Ajuntament then commissioned about it, published in September 2025, opens by describing the suppression from 2028 of the more than 10,000 tourist flats operating in the city. Same measure, rounded down; the exact count is in the 2024 notes.

The mayor’s line at the time: we are the first European city to take this measure, but we will not be the last.

If you are reading this in 2026 or 2027, nothing about your trip changes. What changes is an assumption. The stock of short-let flats in the old city is not a permanent feature of the place; it has an expiry date printed on it, and the city has published the arithmetic.

The study, which is the interesting part

Cities usually announce something like this and let other people argue about the consequences. Barcelona commissioned the argument from its own Institut d’Economia de Barcelona and published the answer, including the parts that are inconvenient.

What it projects when 10,000 flats go back to residential use:

• Rents down 8 % to 13.4 % — an average of 92 to 152 euros a month
• Purchase prices down 6.1 % — about 22,400 euros
• City GDP down about 36 million euros a year, which the study itself calls 0.04 % of total GDP, and practically imperceptible
• Social-security affiliations down 0.35 % to 1.35 %, against 1.2 million affiliated in the city

And it says why the GDP number is so small: the fall in retail and hospitality is offset by growth in financial, property, professional and technical activity. Money does not leave; it moves.

The report also lists its own limitations and possible biases, which is the mark of a study rather than a press release. And the city has attached something to it that is easy to miss: Barcelona Activa will run a retraining and job-transition service from the last quarter of 2027 until the end of 2029, delivered from Porta22 and from district facilities in Ciutat Vella, Sant Martí, the Eixample, Sants-Montjuïc and Nou Barris.

Whatever you think of the policy, that is a city doing its homework in public. It is also, if you are staying in a flat in the Barri Gòtic, a description of the building you are standing in.

What the neighbourhood is like to sleep in, on the city’s own numbers

Three things, all from municipal surveys, all with the source at the bottom.

It is the district where residents feel least safe. Ciutat Vella scores its own neighbourhood 4.9 out of ten and the city as a whole 5.7 — and it is the only district in Barcelona that rates its own streets below the city. Every other district does the opposite. The recorded-incident ratio is 137.3 per hundred inhabitants against 55.2 for the next district down. The full picture, including why almost all of that is theft rather than anything else, is in is the Gothic Quarter safe.

It is a place residents have partly withdrawn from. In the 2025 perception survey, «el Gòtic, el Raval and the old town» is the fourth most avoided area in Barcelona at 25.5 %, and among people who live in a tourist neighbourhood, 55.0 % now say tourism is harmful for their neighbourhood against 38.1 % who say beneficial. That survey is worth reading whole.

And within it, the difference between streets is enormous. La Rambla scores 27.1 % on the avoidance list. El Born scores 7.4 %. The cathedral and Santa Maria del Mar score 3.9 %. Ten minutes’ walk apart.

That last line is the practical one. «Staying in the Gothic Quarter» is not one decision. Staying twenty metres off La Rambla and staying between the cathedral and Via Laietana are different holidays, and the city’s own data says so.

What we would actually weigh

For it. You can walk to almost everything, including out of it — the Born, the Raval, the seafront and the Eixample all begin at its edges. The mornings are extraordinary and they are free: the streets between seven and nine belong to deliveries and to people going to work, and that is the version of this neighbourhood that survives in your memory. So does the night, which is its own argument.

Against it. Noise carries in stone canyons and closes nothing out. There is very little green. The middle of the day, from about eleven to five, is not yours. And the ordinary infrastructure of living — a supermarket that is not a tourist supermarket, a chemist, somewhere to sit that is not consuming something — thins out the closer you get to the Rambla.

The compromise most people should take. Sleep at the quiet end of the old city or just outside it, and walk in. Gràcia is the version of that argument we know best — it scores 2.9 % on the avoidance list and 6.8 out of ten on resident safety, and it is twelve minutes on the metro.

Two things we are deliberately not printing

Rates for the tourist tax. The municipal surcharge is on a rising schedule under Llei 2/2026 and any figure we print here is wrong within months. What we will note, because these are stable facts about dated documents: the Ajuntament published in February 2026 that 56.6 % of Barcelona’s population are very or fairly in favour of increasing it, against 6.7 % against and 33.4 % who do not know — and that tourist taxation became the city’s second largest source of income in 2025, at 148.08 million euros, behind only the property tax. Three quarters of residents know the tax exists; fewer than half know what it pays for.

A list of hotels. We have no way to keep it honest and no reason to be trusted about it.

The one practical thing to do before you pay

Check the licence. The Ajuntament publishes a lookup — barcelona.cat/habitatgesturistics, mirrored at fairtourism.barcelona, in Catalan, Spanish, English, French and German — where you type an address and it tells you whether that flat is licensed.

It exists because the problem is real: in August 2025 the city put 10,400 posters in the entrance halls of the five districts with most illegal lets — Ciutat Vella, the Eixample, Gràcia, Sant Martí and Sants-Montjuïc — precisely to tell residents and visitors that the tool is there. The same note says the council has imposed more than 11,500 sanctions since 2016.

Two minutes, and it is the only part of this page that can save you an actual bad evening.

Where this sits with the rest

If you are still deciding whether the neighbourhood earns your time at all, that is its own page. If you already know you are staying and want the walk that makes sense of it, what to see in the Gothic Quarter goes in an order that does not double back. And if the density of the old city is the thing that worries you, the Barceloneta is the other extreme: a grid built to a firing solution, whose typical home was once a rented quarter of a house.

And our own contribution is two hours: the Gothic Quarter walk on Monday and Wednesday afternoons, and the same streets after dark on Friday and Saturday nights, which is the one we would book if we were sleeping ten minutes away. We are closed on 25 December and 1 January.