Spain’s housing crisis, and above all the eviction of an 87-year-old woman known as Maricarmen, has revived a term many thought had faded into history: renta antigua, or “old rent”. Between 130,000 and 160,000 households still live under these contracts, paying on average between €300 and €500 a month, and their story stretches back to the Franco dictatorship.
Spain Expat Press Editorial Team
The case that started it all
On 23 September, amid a heavy police presence, 87-year-old Maricarmen was evicted from the flat in Madrid’s Retiro district where her family had lived since 1956. Her father signed the lease 70 years ago. When he died in 1960, it passed to her mother, and when her mother died in 2005, to Maricarmen.
She paid an old-rent tenancy of €280 a month. The rest of what she paid each month, about €450 to €500 in total, went on service charges passed on by the landlord, such as building fees and local property tax (IBI). At market rates, the same flat would now let for about €2,600 a month, more than nine times her rent. When the building was bought by a family-run property company, the new owners offered to sell her the flat for €250,000 or charge her about €1,650 a month in rent. Her pension was €1,450. The company argued that the contract had expired, and the supreme court agreed.
Images of the eviction were shared across Spain. The tenants’ union Sindicato de Inquilinas named its package of emergency demands after her, and the government went on to approve the so-called “Maricarmen decrees”. Parliament threw them out last week; the government re-approved them on Tuesday.
What is renta antigua?
The term refers to rental contracts signed before 9 May 1985. That was the day the so-called Boyer decree came into force, named after the then economy minister, Miguel Boyer. It abolished compulsory renewal (prórroga forzosa), meaning that new leases no longer had to be renewed indefinitely.
Contracts signed before that date kept their original terms. Tenants could stay in their homes indefinitely, paying rents that barely rose over the years.
And what does Franco have to do with it?
Quite a lot. The rules governing old-rent contracts were set during the dictatorship, in the urban tenancy laws of 1946 and 1964.
After the civil war, Spain faced a severe housing shortage. The regime chose to give tenants strong protection: landlords could not evict them when a lease ended, because contracts were renewed automatically, and rents were tightly controlled. The 1964 law also allowed a tenancy to pass to family members when the tenant died, a process known as subrogation, up to two times. As a result, many families lived in the same flat for generations.
There is a second link to the Franco era, and it has been widely discussed in Maricarmen’s case. At the time, married women were legally subordinate to their husbands: until 1975 they needed their husband’s permission, known as licencia marital, for many legal acts. As a result, leases were almost always signed by the man of the house. The housing lawyer Alejandra Jacinto argues that if Maricarmen’s mother had been named on the original contract, her daughter’s situation would have been “very different”, because the lease would have been passed on one time fewer.
The 1994 law and the blame game
The 1994 Urban Tenancy Act, passed under a Socialist (PSOE) government, put an expiry date on old-rent contracts. It introduced transitional rules that limit further transfers. As a general rule, when a child inherits a tenancy, they keep it only for a limited period, with exceptions such as a disability of 65% or more. Maricarmen had a recognised disability of 50%.
That is why some dispute Franco’s role in the case. The economist Juan Ramón Rallo and the newspaper El Debate argue that it was the 1994 law, not the Francoist one, that made the eviction possible. In reality, the two fit together: the Franco-era law created the contract and the way it was inherited, and the 1994 law brought it to an end.
How many are left, and how much do tenants pay?
According to estimates published in recent days, between 130,000 and 160,000 households in Spain still have an old-rent contract, between 3% and 5% of the rental market. They are concentrated mainly in the centres of Madrid and Barcelona and a handful of other large cities. The profile is clear: elderly people, many of them the children of the original tenants.
The gap with the market is huge. These tenants pay on average €300 to €500 a month, while market rents in big cities are around €1,200 to €1,500, and much higher for large flats in city centres such as Maricarmen’s. In many cases, the rent is five to 10 times lower than for a comparable property.
The other side: the landlords
For many landlords, old rent has been a financial burden for decades. With rents frozen for so long, the income often barely covers property tax, building charges or repairs. The legal scholar Cristina Argelich, writing on the legal blog Hay Derecho, describes such rents as “uneconomic” and warns that excessive regulation ends up shrinking supply and pushing up prices in the rest of the market.
The vast gap between what tenants pay and what the property could earn has made these buildings a target for investors, from funds to property companies. They buy flats with old-rent tenants and wait for the contracts to expire.
A glance at Spain’s main property portals makes the point. In the heart of Madrid or Barcelona, there are stunning flats, spacious, with high ceilings and in grand period buildings, at surprisingly attractive prices. The small print explains why: “se vende con inquilino” (sold with tenant) or “vivienda con renta antigua” (old-rent property). The buyer acquires the flat but cannot live in it or let it at market rates until the contract ends. For some investors it is a long-term bet. For the tenant, often an elderly person, it means not knowing who their next landlord will be.
What do the new decrees say?
The housing decrees contain no specific measures on old rent. They do include protection from eviction for vulnerable people with nowhere else to go and an extraordinary extension of certain leases, which could indirectly benefit some of these tenants. Everything, however, still depends on the new texts being published in Spain’s official gazette and on a vote in the Diputación Permanente, the standing committee of the dissolved parliament.
A relic of another era
Old rent is disappearing, contract by contract. But Maricarmen’s case has exposed a clash between two realities: elderly people who risk losing the home of a lifetime, and landlords who for decades have received rents far below market value. In the middle of a housing crisis and with an election looming, that clash has become a symbol, and a legacy of the Franco era that Spain has yet to fully resolve.
