The Lleida Provincial Council, together with representatives of city councils, entities such as the UGT and CCOO unions and businessmen from the hotel sector, have presented this Thursday a manifesto that demands the “effective regulation of housing for tourist use“in the municipalities of the Pyrenees. “We have workers living in motorhomesto families rooted in the territory who see how their rental contract is not renewed because they want to transform the home they live in into a tourist apartment,” explained the mayor of Viella (Vall d’Aran), Juan Antonio Serrano. “With the added difficulty of the problem of the lack of affordable housing for find educational and healthcare professionals who want to go to work in the Pyrenees”, he added.
In a territory that fight against depopulation and tries to prevent the departure of its young people, the number of homes for tourist use has experienced a exponential increase since 2015when this type of tourist accommodation was implemented, displacing residential use of the homes, denounce the signatories of the manifesto.
For this reason, they demand that the Parliament support the decree of the Generalitat of urgent measures on the urban planning regime of housing for tourist use, which has been highly criticized, however, by voices from the tourism sector and by some coastal mayors. “Their situation is very different from ours, for us access to housing It’s almost a matter of survival in many towns,” Serrano stressed in conversation with this newspaper.
According to data collected by the provincial entity, the number of homes for tourist use since 2015 in the Alt Pirineu have multiplied by fourgoing from 1,298 to 4,719 in mid-2023. The same sources assure that in 2020, the tourist places in apartments offered in the Alt Pirineu and Aran they exceeded the number of places offered in any other type of tourist establishment.
“Only in the Vall d’Aran, the tourist apartments that are now open could accommodate 80% of its current population,” illustrated the vice president of the Lleida Provincial Council. “63% would be accommodated in Alta Ribagorça and 55% of its current population in Pallars Sobirà,” he added. “We have cases of businessmen that they have had to acquire or rent entire hotels to accommodate their seasonal workers and we are also detecting the closure of regulated tourist places and businesses that were in operation to give them a new residential use,” Serrano highlighted.
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The signatories of the manifesto trust that the decree presented last November by the Government will have an “effective impact on the rebalancing of the number of homes available for permanent use versus other uses” and, according to the signatories, “will help regulate purchase prices and rent and access to decent and adequate housing for the population that wants to live permanently”.
The manifesto emphasizes the capacity that the application of the decree will generate due to the fact that gives local authorities the decision-making capacity necessary so that they can adapt urban planning to the reality of each municipality, adjusting the number, characteristics and location of tourist apartments and ensuring that they adequately respond to the housing needs of the population.