They broke down an 87-year-old’s door with a battering ram. Then Spain erupted
James Badcock
Madrid: It took the best part of three hours for police officers to peel protesters from the pavement, break down the apartment door with a battering ram and serve an 87-year-old woman in a wheelchair with an eviction notice.
But as Maricarmen Abascal was being carried out of her home of 70 years on a stretcher, she was becoming a symbol of Spain’s spiralling housing crisis.
Her tears were met with cries from hundreds of activists outside, though their mood quickly turned angry.
Riot police used batons and shields and had to beat a retreat near Madrid’s Retiro park after an ambulance took the pensioner to one of the city’s hospitals.
“It’s not an eviction; it’s murder,” a crowd of up to 10,000 people shouted at police before marching across central Madrid to protest outside an apartment block where the regional government has purchased a €6.3 million ($10.2 million) penthouse for official use.
The pensioner has posted video messages from her hospital bed, urging protesters “to defend their right to a home”.
In an interview with Spanish state television on September 22, the eve of the eviction, Abascal criticised Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the regional government’s conservative leader, for failing to provide access to affordable housing for poorer Madrileños.
She blamed other leaders, too, but said the main culprit for her situation was Spain’s left-wing Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez: “He either doesn’t know or doesn’t care about the number of evictions that take place every day.”
At the weekend, hundreds of activists capitalised on the anger over the pensioner’s eviction and set up a protest camp in Puerta del Sol to demand “no more Maricarmens”.
With more than 60 evictions taking place every day in Spain, protesters in cities including Barcelona and Seville have launched demonstrations and replica camps with Abascal as their figurehead.
Abascal’s father signed a rental contract seven decades ago during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, when regulations kept rents low. His widow inherited the contract but the law does not allow the tenancy agreement to be transferred twice, preventing Abascal from taking it on.
In 2018, real estate company Urbagestión bought the apartment and demanded that Abascal pay more than three times her old rent of €500 a month.
The number of evictions has fallen in Spain, from 67,000 in 2015 – close to the height of the Eurozone economic crisis – to 24,500 in 2025. But the proportion of evictions involving tenants has risen, from half of the total a decade ago to almost three-quarters today.
A shortage of housing in and around Spain’s major cities, blamed partly on the popularity of Airbnb and other holiday rentals, has caused real estate prices to spiral. Since 2015, the average house price in the country has increased by 80 per cent and rents by 87 per cent.
Salaries have risen by 28 per cent, merely keeping pace with inflation over the past decade.
“The way things are, I’m never going to be able to leave my parents’ house,” said Luis Santos, a 23-year-old student of law and philosophy, as he swept clean a patch of the famous Madrid square adjacent to his tent.
“What happened to Maricarmen has to change; the people who did that are an absolute disgrace. Housing should be about families’ needs and not investment funds making money.”
“I feel rage at the impunity of these vulture funds who set rents it is impossible for normal people to pay,” said Esther Villardón, a 37-year-old translator and home owner who joined the camp in solidarity with the protesters.
Successive governments in Spain have failed to address the housing market’s inherent weakness: public housing makes up a mere 1.5 per cent of the total stock, compared with 34 per cent in the Netherlands and 16.4 per cent in the United Kingdom.
With immigration increasing the population – 14 per cent of Spain’s 49 million inhabitants are foreigners – the Bank of Spain says the deficit between existing housing units and the number needed has reached 750,000.
House prices are rising at an annual rate of 12.5 per cent, but sales and mortgage deals have begun to fall, a clear sign that most ordinary Spaniards are priced out of the market.
From its encampment in Sol, the Tenants’ Union laid out its demands, including the automatic rollover of rental agreements, protection against eviction and price controls – “otherwise this progressive government has no reason to exist”.
‘I feel rage at the impunity of these vulture funds who set rents it is impossible for normal people to pay.’
Esther Villardón, a 37-year-old home owner
On Tuesday (Madrid time), Sánchez’s cabinet announced a reform package, including anti-eviction measures, the rollover of rent contracts and help for first-time buyers, all of which Congress will need to approve.
But Sánchez’s coalition has lost any reliable parliamentary majority and similar anti-eviction measures were rejected earlier this year, having been in place since the COVID-19 pandemic.
The government blames the opposition for sabotaging its plan to allow local authorities to impose rent ceilings in areas with the highest demand, with many leaders of the conservative opposition People’s Party (PP) having refused to enact the measure.
The opposition suspects the protests could provide Sánchez with a way to recover from disastrous polling before a general election in 2027.
After a series of corruption scandals concerning senior figures in the prime minister’s Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) and a migration crisis after more than 70,000 people crossed from Morocco into Ceuta – the Spanish exclave in northern Africa – opposition leaders have accused Sánchez of deliberately allowing the camp to remain in Sol and shift the news agenda.
The PP’s national leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, ruled out supporting new housing measures before seeing them in writing, describing them as a “sterile bid to exhaust the legislature”.
Sánchez has called for a special session of Congress on Friday to debate his measures.
“We need to see the small print; we’ll do whatever we need to do,” Valeria Racu, the Tenants’ Union spokesman, said when asked whether the camp would remain in Sol after the government published its reform plans.
While the fate of one of Europe’s few left-wing governments remains on the line, Abascal appears to have come out victorious.
On Tuesday, Urbagestión allowed her to return to her apartment on the original rent.
