Maricarmen's eviction has brought thousands onto the streets, reigniting concern over access to housing in Spain as prices soar, rents rise and supply trails demand.
Images of María del Carmen Abascal, known as Maricarmen, being evicted from her home in Madrid have become the latest symbol of Spain's housing access crisis.
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The 87-year-old had been living as a tenant in the property for around 70 years. According to the Madrid Tenants' Union, after a change of ownership a rent increase was proposed from around 500 euros to 2,650 euros a month, later reduced to 1,650.
After several attempts to halt the eviction, Maricarmen was evicted and later taken to hospital. The case triggered protests that quickly spread beyond Madrid.
Yet the scale of the reaction is difficult to grasp by looking only at this eviction. Maricarmen's case comes at a time when access to housing has become one of the main economic pressures on many Spanish households.
How much have housing prices risen in Spain?
Sale prices are currently growing at double-digit rates. The National Statistics Institute's (INE) Housing Price Index recorded a 12.2% year-on-year increase in the second quarter of 2026.
Second-hand housing, which makes up most of the Spanish market, became even more expensive, rising 12.9%, while new-build homes increased by 7.4%. Compared with the previous quarter alone, prices rose by another 3.4%.
The problem does not only affect those who want to buy. The average advertised rent reached 15.1 euros per square metre in August 2026, according to Idealista, 5.8% more than a year earlier. And these increases come on top of the rises recorded in recent years.
As a result, the cost of housing absorbs a large share of many households' income, especially for those who rent.
According to INE data, in 2024 28.1% of people renting a home at market rates were spending more than 40% of their disposable income on housing costs. The European Union average was 19.2%.
So the affordability problem is not simply that homes are more expensive. For a significant share of tenants, keeping a home consumes a very large proportion of their income.
Why have prices and rents risen so much?
Experts stress that there is no single explanation, but behind the current situation lies a fundamental imbalance: in the places where most people want or need to live, not enough housing is being created to absorb demand.
Spain continues to gain population and create new households, while housing construction remains far below the levels seen before the financial crisis.
The Bank of Spain has repeatedly highlighted the supply shortfall as one of the main factors putting pressure on the market, especially in the most economically dynamic areas, where population and employment have grown the most.
This calls for an important distinction. Spain does not literally lack homes across its entire territory. There are municipalities with stagnant populations and empty properties. The problem is where those homes are located.
Pressure is particularly intense in Madrid, Barcelona, the islands, much of the Mediterranean coast and other major urban and tourist centres. An empty home in a town with little economic activity does not solve the shortage of flats in Madrid, Málaga, Barcelona or Palma.
Why doesn't Spain simply build more homes?
Part of the answer lies in the consequences of the previous property crisis. Before 2008, Spain experienced a huge construction boom fuelled by cheap credit. The bursting of the bubble led to the disappearance of numerous developers, problems in the banking system and a collapse in building activity.
Residential construction later recovered, but never returned to those levels. This also helps explain why today's market looks very different from the one that preceded the financial crisis. The Bank of Spain notes that new housing production remains much more moderate than in previous expansionary cycles and that the supply shortfall is concentrated in particular areas.
Building housing also takes time. Rezoning land, securing planning permission, obtaining finance and putting up a building can take years. The housing supply therefore adjusts slowly when a city's population grows quickly, and that slowness has consequences for prices.
If tens of thousands of people need additional housing in a given area but the residential stock barely increases, competition for the existing properties intensifies.
What role does population growth play?
Spain is approaching 50 million inhabitants after several years of strong demographic growth, driven mainly by immigration. This growth has positive economic effects: it increases the working-age population, consumption and the number of workers.
But it also increases the need for housing. Moreover, to understand the housing market, both the number of inhabitants and the number of households matter. A couple who separate and come to need two homes, young people leaving the parental home or workers moving to another city all create new households even if the total population barely changes.
When the number of households grows faster than the available housing stock, competition for housing intensifies. This phenomenon is particularly visible in major employment centres such as Madrid, where new residents, workers, students, families and young people seeking independence compete for a limited supply.
What about foreign buyers and holiday rentals?
Both factors have an impact, but their importance varies greatly depending on location. Holiday rentals can reduce the housing available for long-term residential tenants in neighbourhoods with strong visitor demand, especially in large cities, on the islands and in some coastal destinations.
International demand also carries significant weight in the sales market. According to the College of Registrars, foreign buyers accounted for 15.98% of home purchases in Spain in the second quarter of 2026, the highest share recorded to date. Their presence is particularly strong in the Balearic Islands, where they made up 32.27% of transactions, and in the Valencian Community, with 31.03%.
But speaking of "foreign buyers" covers very different realities. The nationalities most present in the Spanish market as a whole are still mainly European and Moroccan. Registrars' data for 2025 placed Britons, Germans, Dutch, Moroccans, Romanians, French and Italians among the main nationalities of foreign buyers.
The arrival of Latin American migrants is also part of the demographic context of recent years, with communities such as the Venezuelan one increasingly established in Spain. In 2025, 36,271 people of Venezuelan origin acquired Spanish nationality, the third most common country of origin among new citizens, after Morocco and Colombia, according to the National Statistics Institute (INE).
The small stock of social housing
There is another important feature of the Spanish market: the stock of social rental housing is small compared with other European countries. Public or social rental housing accounts for less than 2% of Spain's residential stock, compared with around 8% across the European Union, according to figures cited in the debate sparked by the current protests.
This means that a larger proportion of low and middle-income households depend directly on the private market. In countries with a larger social housing stock, more people can access rentals whose price does not depend solely on market conditions.
In Spain, when private rents rise quickly, there is only a relatively small public stock able to absorb households that can no longer afford them.
Young people show another side of the problem
One of the clearest indicators of the difficulty of accessing housing lies, paradoxically, outside the housing market itself: many young people simply do not manage to enter it. In 2025, 44.3% of Spaniards aged between 26 and 34 were still living with their parents, one of the highest shares in Europe.
Among them, almost half (47.3%) said their main reason was that they could not afford to buy or rent a home. And among people of all ages who had looked for another home but ultimately not moved, nearly seven in ten cited excessive prices as the main obstacle.
This helps explain why the housing debate affects very different generations. Young people struggle to move out. Tenants face high rents. Families compete for larger homes. And some older tenants can find themselves in vulnerable situations when the ownership or contract conditions of their homes change.
Why has Maricarmen's case prompted so much mobilisation?
Maricarmen's story brings many of these tensions together in a single case. It is not about a young person trying to enter the housing market for the first time, but about an 87-year-old woman who had spent roughly seven decades living in the same home.
Her eviction has therefore put the spotlight on another dimension of the housing crisis: housing insecurity does not only affect those searching for a flat or trying to move out, but also people who have been renting for decades when the ownership or terms of their contracts change.
The specific circumstances of the case have also triggered a political dispute. The central government, the Madrid regional authorities, the city council, the owner and tenants' organisations have disagreed over who is responsible and what measures could have been taken to prevent the eviction.
Amnesty International has argued that evicting Maricarmen without providing her with an adequate housing alternative violated her rights, while the different authorities have blamed one another for what happened.
But the protests have gone beyond Maricarmen's individual case. Her eviction has taken place at a time when buying a home is becoming ever more expensive, rents continue to rise and a significant share of households are struggling to meet these costs.
The demonstrations have thus turned an individual case into a symbol of a collective problem. Maricarmen's circumstances are exceptional, as few people spend seven decades in the same rental home, but the context in which her eviction has taken place is not.