Corina Cost says she never missed a rent payment in 18 years of living at Casa de la Papallona, a six-storey Modernist building in the heart of Barcelona. She continued to pay the rent even after her lease expired in March 2025 and through her battle against the eviction of her family.
That changed on 15 October, when she joined three other residents on a rent strike.
"We're not going to leave our homes," she said at a press conference while sitting next to her neighbour of four years, Anna Olesti.
The residential block — named after the butterfly-shaped mosaic on its façade — had been bought by a Dutch investment company in 2024 that planned to convert the apartments into co-living accommodation, or shared housing.
Tenants were told their leases would not be renewed and they would have to move out. Among the affected are an elderly woman and her father, who have been residents for 30 years.
Your trusted source for staying up-to-date with the world around you. Get free daily news updates and analysis, straight to your inbox.
Some tenants left. Others, like Cost, decided to challenge their evictions.
Cost says that "the prospect of losing our home, our surroundings, and our neighbourhood" has had a profound impact on her family and her two teenage children, who were born here and attend a local school.
"There's a deep sense of insecurity and loss of control," she told SBS Dateline. "It is not just difficult—it is impossible—to find an affordable rental in a city under such intense housing pressure."
Olesti, a 25-year-old Barcelona native and lawyer, is leading the fight, backed by the Social Housing Union of Catalonia. She says 40 per cent of her income goes towards rent, and even so, finding a new place at this rate would be difficult, she says.
"Moving out isn’t an option. It’ll be impossible to find another place," she said.
"Most of my friends had to leave the city, not even the neighbourhood. We can’t permit these investment funds to steal our city."
With a lease expiring in March 2027, Olesti says they decided to stop "financing the landlord who wants to speculate on our right to housing".
Across Spain, tenants have been organising to block evictions and push back against corporate landlords. Their frustrations echo the sentiment in other European cities where rising housing costs and gentrification are pushing ordinary citizens and youth out of neighbourhoods they can no longer afford.
In September, protests erupted in Madrid over the eviction of 87-year-old pensioner María del Carmen Abascal. The private equity company that bought her building in 2018 raised her rent from €500 ($770) to €1,650 ($2,545) a month, which was more than her monthly pension. After she failed to pay, the landlord ordered her eviction.
Images of the frail woman being carried on a stretcher out of the home where she had lived for seven decades sparked nationwide outcry over the depth of Spain’s housing crisis. Protests have been taking place in more than 50 cities, drawing tens of thousands of people. The country’s largest trade and tenant unions have announced a general strike over housing and wages for 11 November.
In response, the government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez passed emergency housing measures, which had earlier been rejected by the parliament, prompting Sánchez to dissolve it and call a snap election for 29 November . Among the measures were a ban on evicting vulnerable people, tighter rules on terminating rental leases, and limits on corporate purchases of residential property.
Few places in Spain have felt the housing squeeze as acutely as Barcelona. Over the past decade, rents have risen by more than 50 per cent, according to Barcelona City Council data .
A 2026 analysis by real estate website Idealista found that the supply of mid-sized homes suited to families and middle-income households "is practically disappearing", leaving a rental market dominated by either small apartments or large properties aimed at high-income earners.
Social housing accounts for just 2 per cent of Barcelona’s housing stock , far below the 7 per cent average in the European Union.
For tenants' rights activists, the underlying issue is that property has become a lucrative investment asset. In Barcelona, where demand for housing outstrips supply, and tourism is booming, property owners have been turning to more profitable business models. In 2025 alone, Barcelona had 16 million visitors.
"We need some structural changes, and it comes with that there has to be a consensus that housing is a right, and that houses are meant for people to live in instead of being a way to make more money," said Txema Escorsa, an activist with the Tenants Union.
"Our salaries are still pretty much the same, and it’s like we, locals, are getting evicted from our own city."
In recent years, Barcelona has introduced a number of pro-tenant reforms and rent controls. The city has also announced plans to phase out all short-term tourist rentals, commonly known as simply Airbnbs, by 2028, returning more than 10,000 licensed flats to the long-term rental market.
However, tenants' rights advocates argue that enforcement has been poor, allowing landlords to flout regulations or exploit legal loopholes.
Escorsa, a 34-year-old schoolteacher, is fighting his own eviction from the flat where he has lived for 11 years, in the popular Gracia neighbourhood.
The building was bought in 2023 by New Amsterdam Developers (NAD), the same company that owns Casa de la Papallona. Some apartments have already been converted into shared accommodation.
Escorsa found out that one room was being advertised for €950 a month ($1,500), well above €811 ($1,250) that one current tenant pays for an entire flat.
Under Catalan law, the total rent collected from individual rooms cannot exceed the maximum rent permitted for the entire flat. The Tenant Union filed a complaint with the Catalan Housing Agency, alleging that NAD breached rent caps.
NAD and its local partner, Enter Coliving, which manages the room rentals, did not respond to requests for comment and have not publicly addressed the allegations.
Critics, including the Catalan pro-independence party Junts, which had seven MPs in the Congress and voted against Sanchez’s bills, say new measures don’t distinguish between small property owners, who make up the vast majority of landlords in Spain, and large owners. NAD, for instance, is believed to own a dozen blocks in Barcelona.
Eduard Soler, a lawyer and board member of Som Habitatge, an association that represents more than 32,000 property owners in Catalonia, says expanding tenant protections could have the opposite effect to the one intended, further reducing the supply of rental housing.
The association says around 92 per cent of property owners in the region own between one and 10 properties, with the vast majority owning just one.
Soler says the shift towards short-term rentals is partly a result of government policies that have made long-term renting “unworkable” because rent caps, fines, and restrictions on evicting non-paying tenants have increased legal and financial risks for ordinary property owners.
"Some stop renting altogether; others sell. And the buyers tend to be more specialised companies with the scale and the legal resources to obtain a higher return from the same property — through seasonal lets, rooms, coliving, or other formats," he said.
Last year, Barcelona City Council and social housing foundation Hàbitat3 bought Casa Orsola, a Modernist-style residential building just a few blocks away from Casa de la Papallona, from private equity fund Lioness Inversiones, bringing an end to a four-year legal battle between the owner and tenants opposing evictions.
The city said the building would be added to its affordable housing stock with capped rents.
Tenant unions, however, criticised the €9 million ($14.4 million) price tag, arguing that it was far higher than €6 million ($9.5 million) the previous owner had paid just a few years earlier.
Tenants at Casa de la Papallona are demanding that their building be expropriated, preventing the investor from making any profit on the sale.
Escorsa, meanwhile, wants the city council to jointly buy his building and share the ownership with the residents. His eviction has been put on hold during the mediated negotiations with the landlord.
"We are in the middle of the talks, and hopefully this will be a solution. If not, we are also happy to stay as renters."
Dateline is an award-winning Australian, international documentary series airing for over 40 years. Each week Dateline scours the globe to bring you a world of daring stories. Read more about Dateline
Have a story or comment? Contact Us
