Date Published: 09/05/2023

How many short-term rental apartments does Murcia really have? More than ever...

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The Region of Murcia has 6,288 properties for letting out to tourists, and this number is increasing

How many short-term rental apartments does Murcia really have? More than ever...

Almost one out of every 100 properties in the Region of Murcia are registered as being destined for short-term lets by tourists, according to the latest data from the National Statistics Institute.

Specifically, 0.81% of the properties in the province are for holiday accommodation. There are a total of 6,288 holiday let apartments, 980 of which are located in Murcia capital city.

This is around 2.3% more tourist let apartments than there were in 2020, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the number of people who can stay in them is counted at 32,636, +1.7% than three years ago. That’s an average of just over five people in each property.

In Spain as a whole, the number of tourist rental apartments is 305,136, 5% fewer than three years ago, and the number of bedplaces is 1.5 million, 100,000 less than in 2020.

Tourism professionals from the group Exceltur have expressed their concern about what they see as an uncontrolled boom in the tourist housing market and its effects on the increase in the cost of access to housing, the nuisance to neighbours and the social stigmatisation of tourism.

Foreign tourism already gets a bad enough name in Spain, with visitors to the country frequently seen to cause drunken disturbances. A recent proposal in Spain to cap the number of tourist rentals on offer in the busiest and most stressed areas was voted down pretty quickly, but other locations are considering increasing the amount of tourist tax that must be paid to stay per night.

Now read: What is the tourist tax, how much is it and where in Spain do you have to pay it?

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