Outrage over property profiteering and government inaction showed its strength and mobilising power on 5 April, with 42 demonstrations demanding lower rents or the implementation of indefinite contracts, among other measures such as reclaiming empty, tourist and seasonal homes; ending speculative buying and selling; and expanding the public rental housing stock.

“Today’s mobilisations, with thousands of people taking to the streets in more than 40 cities, are not an isolated event: they are the expression of a change in the cycle,” according to the Sindicat de Llogateres, one of the Catalan organisations calling for the demonstrations along with various assemblies for the right to housing, joined by some trade unions and political parties. “Rental prices continue to soar, the risk of losing one’s home once the contract ends keeps growing, and the possibility of finding stable rental accommodation has vanished with the proliferation of temporary rentals and co-living arrangements,” the Catalan collective points out.

The Barcelona demonstration brought together 100,000 people, according to the Sindicat de Llogateres, who arrived at Plaza España at 6pm from different columns coming from various points of the city and the surrounding area. Once there, they held a rally with speeches from La Caixa strikers, shantytown dwellers from Vallcarca, from La Moreneta block—owned by Sareb in Sant Celoni—, from the Dar Zwina block—organised in Premià de Mar—and spokespersons from the organisations of the Housing Union Table: Sindicat de Llogateres, Confederació Sindical d’Habitatge de Catalunya, Plataforma d’Afectats per la Hipoteca and Sindicat d’Habitatge Socialista.

“We are going on a rent strike in defence of public housing,” stated Àgueda Amestoy, one of the strikers, during her speech at the political rally in Barcelona. She is one of a hundred tenants from Banyoles, Sitges and Sentmenat who have begun a rent strike this month against La Caixa to prevent the privatisation of protected housing and to take action in the face of the Govern’s passivity.

According to the Sindicat de Llogateres, “faced with governments that address the problem with tepid measures that play into the hands of employers’ organisations, society has come out to say that there is a conflict of interest surrounding housing, and that as long as it remains a business that enriches a few, it will never be a right for the majority.” The collective views the demonstrations as “one more step in the historical process in which citizens have taken the reins of the problem and begun to organise themselves.”

A few hours earlier in Madrid, more than 100,000 people, mostly wearing orange T-shirts, gathered at Atocha to march along Paseo del Prado to the vicinity of Plaza de España, where they denounced the inaction of the central and regional governments in guaranteeing universal access to decent housing.

“Enough of leaving with our heads down, enough of invisible evictions. From the unions, we call on the half million households whose contracts end in 2025 to stay at home and resist. Casa Orsola, Tribulete 7 and the blocks fighting against Blackstone show us that when we organise, we cannot be evicted,” proclaimed Valeria Racu, spokesperson for the Tenants’ Union, at the beginning of the march.

In Andalusia, more than 40,000 people in five of the eight provinces took to the streets at a time when rental prices are reaching historic highs in the Autonomous Community.

In Malaga, the nearly 30,000 people, according to the organisers, marched through the city from Plaza de la Merced to Parque de Huelin to go “from the centre to the neighbourhoods.” The Málaga para vivir movement states that “it is the tenants, the precarious workers, the neighbours from their districts, who can reclaim the neighbourhood, the centre and the city.”

In Granada, immediate rent regulation was demanded, along with a halt to mass tourism, the use of empty homes—as the city counts more than 12,000—as well as an end to evictions without housing alternatives, homelessness, and the criminalisation of people fighting for the right to housing. More than 4,000 people traversed the main streets of Granada in a march that started from Triunfo in defence of housing, “a basic right that they want to take away from us.”

In Galicia, tenants’ unions from large cities and most civil society groups managed to organise substantial mobilisations in the major urban centres. Several thousand people marched through the streets of Vigo to demand “real and immediate” measures that once and for all limit the housing market: “The housing emergency affects more and more of us. Young people, elderly people, and those in many different life circumstances,” activists shouted during the reading of the manifesto in Porta do Sol.

“Housing is not a business or an asset for speculation: it is a right.” This is how the manifesto read by the Vigo Tenants’ Union began in the context of Galicia’s largest mobilisation during this day of demonstrations across Spain.

In A Coruña, the demonstration brought together around 5,000 people on Saturday morning to march from Plaza de Ourense to Plaza de Maria Pita, where the City Council is located. On Friday, following neighbourhood pressure, the council requested that the Xunta declare the entire city as a strained residential area, as provided for in the new housing law, due to the exponential increase in rental prices suffered in recent years.

In Donostia, the only Basque city where a demonstration was called for this 5 April, several thousand people gathered around 12:00 noon in front of the Boulevard, the boundary of the city’s original urban centre. From there, they shouted slogans such as ’No profiteering from housing!’ And ’No evictions!’ in front of the City Hall and throughout the march. For the Socialist Housing Union of the Basque Country, which called the demonstration with the support of many other organisations, the solution to the housing problem “will not come from public financing of the real estate business, but from the organised struggle for effective improvements” and the “reduction of the real estate sector’s profits.”

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Originally published in El Salto, and translated for Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières by Adam Novak.

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