María del Carmen Abascal Martín left her apartment in Madrid’s Retiro neighborhood on a stretcher last Wednesday. She had lived there for decades. Her father first rented the property in 1956, and she stayed on as the tenant after her parents died. When police carried the 87-year-old out, an eviction that courts had blocked three times finally went through, and a woman most of Spain had never heard of became the face of a housing crisis the country has been failing to solve for years.
The eviction undid itself within days. A judge revoked the order, and by Saturday tens of thousands of people were marching through central Madrid demanding protections for tenants like Abascal, known to supporters as Maricarmen. Some demonstrators camped overnight in the Puerta del Sol, the plaza that anchors the city, and more joined on Sunday, many of them families spanning several generations. The demands were precise: stronger tenant protections, anti-fraud rules, and a ban on evictions when no alternative housing is available.
The fight behind the protest began long before last week. The building changed hands in 2018, and Urbagestión, an investment fund that bought the unit, raised her rent from 500 euros to 2,650 euros a month, according to the Madrid Tenants’ Union, which organized Saturday’s march. The rent had been held down for years under a cap tied to her original tenancy. When the building changed ownership, the new landlord could raise it once the cap no longer applied. The fund later cut the rent to 1,650 euros, still more than Abascal could afford on her pension. She was offered the chance to buy the apartment but could not, the union said.
Spain’s housing shortage is now among the sharpest in Europe. The Bank of Spain estimated the country was short about 550,000 homes last year, with Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia accounting for a large share of the gap. Public rental housing makes up less than 2 percent of supply, near the bottom of the OECD, against a European Union average of 8 percent. Rents have climbed while wages have lagged, and analysts said tourism and population growth in the big cities have squeezed supply further.
This was not the first time Spaniards have filled their plazas over housing. In the summer of 2024, protests erupted in Barcelona and other cities against the tourism that prices local people out of their own neighborhoods, and tenants’ groups have marched on Madrid repeatedly since. What changed last week was the image at the center of it: an elderly woman carried from her home on a stretcher, a detail that cut through years of abstract debate about supply and demand.
The protesters did not aim their anger only at landlords and investment funds. They wanted the government to act, and the encampment in the Puerta del Sol was aimed squarely at a political class that has struggled to deliver on housing despite repeated promises. “I haven’t managed to defend my home, but I have fought so that others can learn to fight for what’s theirs,” Abascal said in a video recorded from a hospital bed and shared by the union.
The pressure lands on a parliament that has already legislated without satisfying tenants. Spain passed a national housing law three years ago that capped rents in stressed zones, but enforcement has been uneven, and the shortage the Bank of Spain counted has only grown. Tesh Sidi, a socialist parliamentarian, has pushed instead for a guaranteed right to housing and what she called “the right to have an affordable life,” a framing the protesters in the plaza have taken up. The gap between the law on the books and what tenants can actually afford is the space the demonstration is filling.
Abascal is expected to return to the apartment, her representatives said, now that the eviction order has been revoked. The reversal settles her case but not the dispute behind it. The fund still owns the unit, the rent that jumped fourfold remains on paper, and the 550,000-home shortage the Bank of Spain counted has not moved. The tenants’ groups that organized the march have said they will keep the encampment in place until the government commits to the protections the crowd demanded. One eviction reversed is a reprieve, not a policy.
Whether the protest outlasts the week is the open question. Past demonstrations over housing have flared and faded without changing much. What is different now is the encampment, the running coverage, and a first name, Maricarmen, that has given an abstract crisis a specific face. If the government moves quickly, the tents come down and the story cools. If it does not, the people still sleeping in the Puerta del Sol have said they are not leaving.
