By Anna Zuurmond
AS he sat in a camping chair overlooking Granada’s Palacio de Congresos, Fadel looked out over the hundreds of tents pitched in the square.
When we spoke to him on October 11, the 21-year-old university student and waiter had been camping in the 200-tent village for nine days – and with good reason.
Last year, he spent September without a mattress in his shared house, and this year he went a month without a working toilet flush and with a broken shower.
“I asked my landlord to do something about it, and even offered to fix everything myself,” Fadel said. “Nothing happened for weeks.
“People are being robbed of half their salary to pay rent, and yet the homeowner gets all the protections.”
Fadel is one of around 500 protesters who have camped on the esplanade since early October.
They say they will stay put until their basic demands for affordable rents and tenants’ rights are met.
Widespread housing protests and encampments began across Spain on September 23, sparked by the eviction of 87-year-old Maricarmen Abascal from the home she had rented for seven decades by an investment firm.
Maricarmen died on October 7, two weeks after her eviction.
She has become something of a martyr for the ongoing housing protests across Spain, with memorials to her appearing at the centre of many encampments.
The protests have also triggered a political storm, prompting prime minister Pedro Sanchez to call a snap election for November 29 after he failed to pass emergency housing legislation through parliament.
Alba, a 20-year-old social education student at the University of Granada who has been camping since Monday, insists a solution is urgently needed.
“We are not asking for anything extreme. We are asking for a basic human need.
“Who can live without a roof over their head? It’s not sustainable.”
Protesters spoke of a power imbalance between renters and landlords, saying they felt unable to demand better conditions for fear of being told to leave.
Celia, a 23-year-old hotel industry worker originally from Malaga, now lives in Granada with her mother and grandmother.
She has been camping with her boyfriend opposite the Palacio since the protests began.
Like many others, Celia believes tourism is largely to blame for rising costs.
According to a study by property portal Fotocasa, the average renter in Spain now spends roughly 50% of their salary on rent.
She said: “There should be fewer places for tourists. In Spain, we have a lot of problems and a lot of empty houses – and a lot of people who only want to rent to tourists because it’s quick money and they pay a lot more.
“I want to say that it’s not the fault of the people who visit. It’s the homeowners, and how they’re using the money of people from countries with more purchasing power than Spanish families.”
In Granada’s most touristy neighbourhood, the Albaicin, research suggests that 35% of the housing stock is used for short-term rentals, where stays average 2.7 days.
According to Spain’s biggest property portal Idealista, rents have risen by an average of 84% over the past decade.
Valencia and Alicante reportedly saw the biggest increases, while Bilbao and San Sebastian, in the northern Basque Country, recorded the smallest.
At one point, Celia even had to move to Galicia for two years purely because of the lower cost of living.
Under Sanchez’s proposed housing decree, owners of tourist apartments in areas under housing pressure could face property tax surcharges of up to 150%.
Although most protesters are in their 20s and 30s, families and older residents have also turned out to support Granada’s encampment.
Clara, a 76-year-old retired schoolteacher, sits on a bench beside young protesters painting banners.
She was evicted in 2011 from a home she had rented for more than a decade.
She is now a member of campaign groups La Calle Mata (The Street Kills) and Stop Desahucios Granada 15M (Stop Evictions Granada 15M).
Around a dozen other households faced eviction at the time.
Together with friends and supporters, they formed a group that spent years resisting eviction and demanding longer contracts – but ultimately lost the fight.
She said: “I want to say that I’ve suffered, but not nearly as much as some. I didn’t end up on the street, and I was working, so I could rent another property.
“Landlords threaten, harass and sometimes even pay renters to look for somewhere else to live.”
She added: “It can’t be that people are dying on the street and they threaten eviction. What happened with Maricarmen is a frequent and normal thing.”
Stop Desahucios members approach local authorities and gather outside the homes of people threatened with eviction to support tenants facing losing their homes.
Clara said she was encouraged to see so many young people protesting together, adding that younger generations faced a host of social and economic problems.
One concern raised by several young protesters was the link between insecure work and housing, with many reporting that they were on temporary or zero-hours contracts.
Celia said regulating rents would give families more “purchasing power” and help create jobs, setting off a virtuous cycle that was badly needed.
“People are here for many motives,” she said.
Organised by the Sindicato de Vivienda de Granada (SVG), the encampment has a daily schedule of activities, including workshops on the legal basics of activism, a clinic offering help to people threatened with eviction, neighbourhood meetings, music and games.
Individuals and community groups have donated food, with protesters saying the support has been extraordinary.
Granada is just one of many Spanish cities where protesters have pitched tents to demand better housing rights and more affordable homes.
The largest encampment is in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, where protesters set up 1,248 tents at the height of the demonstration.
When asked about voting in November’s election, protesters in Granada gave mixed responses.
Alba said: “What we’ve got might be bad, but the far right, the PP and Vox, can exacerbate poverty in the most direct way, without any care whatsoever, and by using as much repression as is necessary. They’re encouraging the politics of Airbnb.”
Another 20-year-old camper said he would also vote for what he considered “the lesser of two evils” in Sanchez’s government, despite criticising the PSOE for what he saw as inaction on important issues.
While several young people at the camp shared that view, others questioned how effective voting would be and what exactly they hoped the protests would achieve.
Fadel said: “There’s a lot of diversity of thought here, from a lot of intervention to little intervention, expropriation yes, expropriation no.”
Following Maricarmen’s death, Sanchez revived housing legislation previously rejected by Congress and put together two similar decrees containing 21 emergency measures just one day after calling a snap election.
One measure seeks to regulate purchases of properties by so-called ‘vulture funds’, a key demand of protesters.
However, some economists have questioned how effectively it could be implemented with the data currently available.
With parliament dissolved until the election, Sanchez’s government passed the measures through the Diputación Permanente, the parliamentary body responsible for handling urgent business while the full chamber is not sitting.
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