Holiday rental boom squeezes out residents in Spain's Malaga

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Málaga: Carlos Carrera Lopez has long lived in central Malaga but fears his neighbourhood in the southern Spanish city is slowly disappearing as holiday ...

Málaga: Carlos Carrera Lopez has long lived in central Malaga but fears his neighbourhood in the southern Spanish city is slowly disappearing as holiday rentals and mass tourism drive residents out.

"We are fighting to ensure this neighbourhood remains inhabited," the 53-year-old doctor, who heads the Old Town residents' association, told AFP, warning of a "mass exodus" caused by mounting tourist pressure.

"The very existence of the neighbourhood is at stake because residents are being forced out," he said. "How is it that we can no longer live in our own city?"

The same trend is playing out across Spain, fuelling protests and a general strike over housing affordability, as the issue became a key battleground ahead of an early general election on November 29.

Opinion polls suggest the conservative opposition is well placed to unseat Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who has been in office since 2018.

Now one of the country's symbols of mass tourism, Malaga, with a population of around 600,000, welcomed a record 1.83 million visitors in 2025.

In some streets of the port city, nearly one in two homes is used for short-term tourist accommodation, according to national statistics institute INE.

It had more than 8,000 tourist apartments last year, up 40 percent from 2020, making it Spain's second-largest market for this type of accommodation, behind Madrid but ahead of Barcelona.

Although tourist rentals account for only a relatively small share of the city's housing stock, they have added to pressure on rents, which have more than doubled over the past decade.

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