You own a house on the Maresme coast, the mortgage is nearly paid, and you are weighing two futures: holiday lets at summer prices, or one tenant on a five-year contract. In Catalonia those are not two settings of the same business. They are two different legal worlds, and the paperwork follows you for years.
People talk about "short-term" and "long-term", but Spanish and Catalan law actually gives you three doors. Tourist letting (vacacional), seasonal letting (temporada, where there is a genuine temporary reason such as work, study or medical treatment), and permanent housing — vivienda habitual, the place where the tenant actually lives. The contract, the deposit and the tenant's rights are different behind each door.
That distinction matters because the Ley de Arrendamientos Urbanos — the LAU — treats permanent housing as the protected case. Minimum duration, deposit registration, how the rent is updated: all of it is built around the idea that somebody's home is at stake. Tourist letting sits under tourism law instead, and temporada sits between the two, much closer to housing than the holiday market likes to admit.
In Catalonia you cannot simply put a flat or a villa on a platform and start taking bookings. Tourist accommodation needs a HUT registration number from the tourism registry, and in Barcelona the city has effectively stopped issuing new ones. The council has said it intends to retire the existing tourist-flat licences by 2028, and an EU-wide registration framework for short-term lets starts applying during 2026, which puts more of the checking duty on the platforms themselves.
So if the plan was a city flat rented by the night, that door is closing, not opening. The coast is a different market, but the direction of travel is the same: licences, registries, and platforms that no longer look the other way.
Seasonal letting is for a temporary reason — a work contract, a semester at university, medical treatment, a house being renovated. What it is not is a way to rent your villa for eleven months and then ask the tenant to leave in June because summer pays better. The contract has to state the temporary purpose honestly.
Catalonia has tightened this. As a rule, landlords now have to keep documentary proof of why the let is temporary, and file that proof together with the deposit paperwork. If you cannot show a real reason, the lease can be treated as permanent housing — with the minimum term and, in an officially stressed area, the rent limit that come with it. That is the trap: you saved one summer and bought yourself a five-year tenancy.
This is the most predictable of the three. You hand over the keys as someone's actual home, and the LAU sets the floor under the relationship: five years minimum if the landlord is an individual, seven if it is a company. The fianza is one month for housing, and in Catalonia it has to be deposited with INCASÒL rather than kept in a drawer. Rent updates follow the official reference index, not whatever the market did that spring.
Per night, the tourist version wins by a mile. Per year, once you subtract the licence risk, management fees, cleaning, empty weeks and the chance of another rule change, the gap narrows a lot. Long-term is the boring option: lower gross yield, but a tenant who still pays in February and a contract you can plan around. Where the Maresme market has quietly moved is into temporada — corporate lets, families between houses, people on a one-year posting — and that is exactly the segment the authorities are now probing. Whatever you pick, get the contract type right first. Everything else, including how well you sleep, follows from that.