Barcelona, a popular holiday destination in Spain, has announced it will bar apartment rentals to tourists by 2029, as popularity of short-term rentals has made housing increasingly unaffordable for residents.

Barcelona, the largest city and capital of Catalunya region in Spain, has announced plans to enact a citywide ban on all short-term rentals.

According to reports, this new measure is to address complaints that tourism is to blame for a local housing crisis and soaring rents.

The Mediterranean city will stop giving new licenses and not renew existing ones so that in 2029 no homes will have permission to be rented as tourist accommodations, Barcelona Mayor Jaume Collboni has said.

Currently, about 10,000 houses are registered as rentals for tourists.

“More supply of housing is needed, and the measures we are presenting today are to provide more supply so that the working middle class does not have to leave the city because they can’t afford housing,” Collboni says.

The boom in short-term rentals in Barcelona, Spain’s most visited city by foreign tourists, has meant some residents can not afford an apartment after rents rose 68 pc in the past 10 years and the cost of buying a house rose by 38 pc, Collboni said. Access to housing had become a driver of inequality, particularly for young people, he added.

“This measure will not change the situation from one day to the next. These problems take time. But with this measure we are marking a turning point,” he adds.

The statement adds that while many cities around the world are facing similar strains, Barcelona’s move may mark the world’s most aggressive stance towards short-stay apartments, which are often listed on online platforms such as Airbnb.

Cities including New York, Vancouver and Tokyo now insist that hosts must live in apartments they rent, while San Francisco and Seattle limit the number of properties a single host can list.

Dallas has banned short-stay apartments from certain neighbourhoods, while many others, London, Amsterdam and Paris among them, have placed limits on the number of nights an apartment can be rented annually on the market.

The statement says that to date, Berlin went the furthest with restrictions, when it introduced a ban on short-stay lets of entire homes in 2016.

However, the city repealed the law in 2018 and replaced it with more lenient regulations that came with heavier fines for violating them because the complete ban proved to be difficult to enforce.

Barcelona has already banned rental of rooms for tourists, said a spokesperson for the city’s urban planning department. Rents have kept climbing, the statement says.

Collboni said on Friday that Barcelona currently has “skyrocketing rental prices that are becoming more expensive every day.”