Evictions and squatting in Spain: what the figures say

On 23 September 2026, 87-year-old Maricarmen Abascal was evicted from the home in Madrid’s Retiro district where she had lived for about seventy years. It was the fourth attempt at the eviction. Hundreds of people had spent the night outside the door trying to stop it. She left the house on a stretcher and was taken to the Gregorio Marañón Hospital.

She died there on 7 October without ever having returned home. No specific medical cause has been made public that would allow her death to be attributed to the eviction. The sequence and the context are, however, established: she was admitted to hospital on the day she lost her home, stayed there until she died, and was 87. Separating out medical causation does not oblige us to empty those facts of meaning.

The case prompted demonstrations in several cities and put evictions back at the centre of the housing debate. A familiar comparison also resurfaced: setting eviction figures against squatting figures as if they described two equivalent threats, measurable in the same unit. They are not.

Unlawful squatting harms whoever has the right to possess a property and demands an effective judicial response. But it does not explain the housing access crisis, nor does it make the judicial loss of a home symmetrical with entering or remaining in a property without title. The available statistics record different proceedings with different coverage, and they cannot support that equivalence.

Maricarmen was not a squatter

The proceedings against Maricarmen did not originate in squatting or, according to published information, in unpaid rent. She lived in a flat held under an old-style rent-controlled tenancy (renta antigua). The dispute arose after the property changed owner and the courts held that the second succession to the lease had lapsed.

This distinction matters because part of the public debate lumps legally different situations under expressions such as “the housing problem” and then uses some to neutralise others. Maricarmen held a prior tenancy and spent years arguing before the courts for the right to stay in the home where she had lived most of her life. Her eviction was legally enforceable. But the fact that an action complies with a court ruling does not answer the decisive political and social question: whether a vulnerable person can be expelled from their home without an adequate alternative being in place first.

The right to property deserves protection. It is not absolute. Article 33 of the Constitution subordinates its content to its social function, and Article 47 requires the public authorities to promote the conditions needed to make the right to decent and adequate housing effective. These provisions neither abolish private property nor authorise the arbitrary deprivation of possession. They require that the State not treat the main home of a vulnerable person as just another interchangeable asset.

Maricarmen’s case does not, on its own, show how many people are in similar situations. It does show the extreme outcome of a system able to enforce the eviction first and reach, afterwards, an agreement that would have allowed her to return. When the solution comes after the loss of the home, protection has failed, even if every individual step has legal cover.

What enforced evictions are

The General Council of the Judiciary does not publish a figure for “people evicted”. It publishes data on lanzamientos (enforced evictions): court actions by which possession of a property is handed over.

In 2025, 25,540 evictions were carried out, 11% fewer than in 2024. The figure covers dwellings and other properties. Where a dwelling is involved, the statistics do not generally show whether it was the habitual residence of the people removed.

18,317 evictions, or 71.7%, arose from proceedings under the Urban Leases Act, mainly for unpaid rent. They fell by 10.9% against 2024.
4,346 evictions, or 17%, originated from mortgage foreclosures. These decreased by 14.3%.
1,877 are recorded as other causes in the published breakdown, a figure that does not reconcile with the total (see the next paragraph).

The General Council of the Judiciary’s press release contains an internal discrepancy: its specific heading and the percentages in the breakdown correspond to 25,540 enforced evictions, but the lead and the body text give 24,540, which is also the sum of the three published components (18,317 + 4,346 + 1,877). The difference of 1,000 points to a misprint in one of those figures, perhaps in “other causes”; that is an inference, not a published figure, and the Council’s annual data sheet could not be opened to settle it. This text uses 25,540 because it is the figure consistent with the heading and the percentages.

Against the fall in evictions, 31,416 mortgage foreclosure proceedings were opened in 2025, 35.6% more than the year before. Opening a foreclosure does not mean an eviction has already taken place: they are different stages of the process.

Each eviction counts one action on one property. It does not count people, and it is not necessarily a separate household. The statistics do not say how many people lived in the property, how old they were, whether there were children or dependants, whether vulnerability was established, whether a housing alternative existed or what happened afterwards.

This is a significant gap. A system that records the recovery of possession but not the residential consequences offers an administrative picture of the procedure, not a full measure of its human cost.

What the civil statistics on squatting measure

Entering or remaining in a property without title can follow a civil or a criminal route.

Under the civil route, 1,845 oral possession proceedings (juicios verbales) for the unlawful occupation of dwellings were filed in 2025, 20.1% fewer than in 2024. This specific procedure allows individuals, non-profit entities entitled to possession and public bodies that own or lawfully hold social housing to claim immediate recovery of possession.

The figure therefore does not cover every possession dispute or every type of owner. Nor does it show the outcome of the cases filed that year, the number of people involved or the use the property had.

Under the criminal route, the Penal Code distinguishes between trespass into a dwelling (allanamiento de morada), which concerns someone else’s home, and the non-violent occupation of a property that is not a dwelling (usurpación). I do not include a national criminal figure for 2025 because I have not been able to verify a consistent official series that would allow comparison without mixing offences, complaints, preliminary proceedings and judgments.

The 1,845 civil squatting cases and the 18,317 evictions arising from tenancy legislation are not directly comparable. The former are proceedings filed; the latter are actions carried out. They sit at different procedural stages, and the squatting statistics have a specific, limited scope.

Nor should an automatic equivalence be drawn between 1,845 affected owners and 18,317 evicted households. Neither figure holds enough information to be translated straight into people or households. What can be said is that they do not support presenting squatting as the main cause of, or a statistical counterweight to, evictions arising from rental tenancies.

Housing is not a subject foreign to art. In A room for six weeks I explained how housing determines who can accept an artist’s residency and under what conditions they can work. In The art that drives up rents I addressed the urban flip side of the same problem: artists and cultural projects can help raise the value of an area and end up pushed out, along with their neighbours, by rising rents. Maricarmen’s case takes that question to its gravest extreme. It is no longer about being able to move temporarily to create, or about staying in a transformed neighbourhood, but about keeping the home where a person has lived for decades.

Squatting does not explain the housing crisis

Acknowledging the harm suffered by someone who unlawfully loses possession of a property does not require attributing to squatting a scale the figures do not support. Nor does it allow squatting to be used to displace the structural problem: prices out of line with incomes, too little public and affordable housing, residential precarity and no alternatives for vulnerable people.

An occupied property is not always a family’s home, nor does it always belong to a small landlord. An eviction does not always affect a main home either. That is precisely why distinctions are needed, rather than a debate built on interchangeable extreme cases.

The specific harm of squatting must be resolved with safeguards and diligence. But the right to recover possession cannot become an argument for normalising the loss of a vulnerable person’s main home without a housing solution. They are different public obligations. Meeting one does not justify failing the other.

The false symmetry also has a political effect: it presents the protection of evicted persons as a concession against property owners, when an essential part of that protection falls to the public administrations. Providing a housing alternative, intervening before an eviction and providing compensation where appropriate does not mean compelling a private individual to indefinitely sustain a social policy. It means that the State assumes its responsibility before the loss of a home becomes irreversible.

Protection in force since October 2026

The framework changed several times during 2026. The extraordinary suspension under Article 1 bis of Royal Decree-Law 11/2020 ceased to have effect on 31 December 2025. New measures and repeals followed.

Royal Decree-Law 29/2026, of 6 October, was published on the 7th and entered into force on 8 October. At the time of closing this text it is in force and awaiting validation by the Standing Committee (Diputación Permanente) of the Congress of Deputies, which performs that function when the chambers are dissolved. If it is not validated within the constitutional period, it will be repealed.

The preamble expressly mentions the case: “The eviction of María del Carmen Abascal awakened the collective conscience.” The sentence acknowledges the case’s political influence, but the measure arrived after the eviction had been carried out, and one day after her death.

Article 2 establishes, until 31 December 2030, two avenues of suspension for vulnerable individuals without a housing alternative:

When the claimant is an entity dedicated to acquiring properties or portfolios of non-performing mortgage loans, under the conditions the decree-law sets out. Once vulnerability and the lack of an alternative have been established, the court must suspend the proceedings, even if the order for eviction has already been issued, provided it has not been carried out.
When the claimant is any other person or entity. If the new extraordinary cure of arrears does not apply, vulnerability and the lack of an alternative persist, and the public authority does not offer an adequate solution, the court must gather information on the resources available and suspend the proceedings if there are none. The measure is reviewed periodically and lifted if the vulnerability ends, an effective alternative is offered, it is refused without justified cause, or three years pass. The decree-law provides compensation where the claimant is an individual or an entity dedicated to affordable or social renting.

The decree-law also introduces an extraordinary cure of arrears (enervación extraordinaria) in certain evictions for unpaid rent where the tenant is in economic vulnerability. The competent public authority has two months to offer a housing alternative or to pay or deposit the sums claimed, those that have fallen due and the costs. If it fails to do so within the period, it takes the debtor’s place and the eviction is not carried out for as long as the vulnerability persists and the lease remains in force.

The decree-law thus shifts part of the cost from the vulnerable person and the landlord onto the authority obliged to intervene. That direction is right: guaranteeing the right to housing should not depend on the affected person’s means, nor be passed on without limit to a private owner.

A transitional provision applies the measures to certain proceedings already under way on 8 October, provided the eviction had not been carried out. That wording excludes Maricarmen’s case. The decree-law could not undo an eviction already carried out, and it should not be presented as if it had come in time to protect her.

What the figures do not tell us

The available court figures do not say how many people suffer from each problem. They count actions, proceedings and properties using different methodologies. They leave basic questions unanswered:

Whether the property was a main home.
How many people lived in it.
Whether there were children, older people or dependants.
Who had the right to possess it and what type of owner was making the claim.
What vulnerability was substantiated.
What alternative was offered.
Whether the eviction was actually executed.
What happened to the affected persons afterwards.

Since the fourth quarter of 2025, the General Council of the Judiciary has published a first approximation of the applications and rulings on suspending evictions from main homes on grounds of special vulnerability. The Council itself warns that these are recent data, still subject to checks for consistency, completeness and quality. It is a step forward, but it does not yet fill the gap.

Maricarmen is not part of the 2025 figures either: her eviction was carried out in September 2026. Her case cannot be used to describe the previous year statistically, or to claim what would have happened under a later measure. The sources consulted also do not allow us to say that the former Article 1 bis would have applied to her proceedings.

What her case does show is something more basic: a protection system that acts after the eviction may come too late. Prevention requires knowing beforehand who is about to lose their main home, what vulnerability exists and which authority must respond.

The central data point is the housing that is lost

The year-on-year fall in evictions is good news, but 25,540 court actions do not become irrelevant because there were fewer than the year before. Nor should the 1,845 civil squatting proceedings be exaggerated or played down: they must be read within their real coverage.

The difference is that only one of these phenomena is a direct part of the housing access crisis: losing a home because the rent or mortgage can no longer be paid, or because a tenancy ends without an adequate solution for a vulnerable person. Squatting may be a consequence of housing exclusion, abusive conduct or a possession dispute of another kind. The available statistics do not allow every case to be reduced to a single explanation.

Rights-based public policy must protect those who unlawfully lose possession and, at the same time, prevent a person from being expelled from their main home without an alternative. The two aims are not incompatible. What is unacceptable is to use the first to water down the second.

Improving the statistics is part of that obligation. Spain needs to know how many evictions affect main homes and vulnerable households, how many people live in each property, what social intervention took place and what happened afterwards. It also needs consistent data on the different forms of squatting and on those genuinely affected.

Without that information, figures that do not measure the same thing will keep being set against each other. And behind them, people will keep disappearing: those who lose possession of a property but, above all, those who lose the place where they live with nowhere else to go.

About the open conversation

This text separates verified data from interpretation and is no substitute for legal advice. It takes an explicit position: the main home, the integrity and the dignity of vulnerable people must be protected before an eviction is carried out, not after. That position does not require denying the rights of those who have unlawfully lost possession of a property.

If you work in housing, court statistics, social services or civil law and want to pin down a figure or discuss this reading, this notebook remains open: write to me.

The author's relationship with the cases

There is no economic, professional, or collection-based relationship with the individuals, companies, and institutions cited.

Evictions and squatting: what the figures behind the Maricarmen case really measure