Vacation homes will be prohibited in communities of neighbors who do not expressly authorize it.
The Supreme Court has sided with two groups of residents in Oviedo and San Sebastián, who had filed two lawsuits to end tourist homes in their respective buildings.
Both communities of neighbors prohibit in their statutes “the use of homes to carry out an economic activity.”
The Civil Chamber of the Supreme Court has supported the neighbors by ruling that tourist apartments are “of a business and commercial nature, provided by a commercial company,” as reported by the preferente.com news portal.
The court states that “in none of the cases examined is it a matter of applying the new regulation of the Horizontal Property Law, which provides that the agreement by which the exercise of this activity is limited or conditioned will require the favorable vote of three-fifths of the total number of owners, but rather to determine if in the community statutes there is a prohibition of allocating the apartments to tourist use.”
However, the Chamber defined that “the limitations have to be clear, precise and express, because the inclusion of tourist activity in the statutory prohibition is perfectly coherent with its letter and spirit, which is none other than to prohibit that an economic activity with a commercial, professional or business character is carried out in the homes, as is the case with tourist apartments.”