Floor collapses at unlicensed tourist flat in Madrid

The Santo Domingo collapse: unlicensed tourist flat

The floor on the fifth storey of number 18 Plaza de Santo Domingo, in the very centre of Madrid, gave way and the structure fell onto the home of a fourth-floor neighbour, who was inside at the time. A day that could have ended in tragedy. The accommodation operating upstairs was a tourist flat and had no licence: the company responsible, La Petite Maison, has acknowledged it and maintains that the application is in process.

There is one jarring detail: the municipal list of authorised tourist flats of the Ayuntamiento de Madrid (city council) does not include that address. And under the new conditions the council is about to approve, it could not obtain a licence either, because it shares a stairway with residential homes. Two overlapping irregularities in the same property. The first is administrative and can be dated. The second — that of the old building — had been standing for more than a century.

What we know about the unlicensed tourist flat

The accommodation was operating without authorisation and there is no record that any authority had detected it before the incident. On the latter point, it is worth separating two things the narrative tends to conflate. One is the legality of the use; the other, the physical strength of the floor slab. An apartment not having a licence does not make the floor collapse. And the floor collapsing does not automatically turn the property into a tourist flat, because a hostal, a traditional guesthouse and a holiday rental are not interchangeable categories and are not subject to the same rules.

Two frameworks coexist in the analysis of the operation. One emphasises the underground economy of tourist rentals: activity without a licence, without prior inspection and with the authorities finding out after the scare. The other points to control of accommodation activity — which reduces square metres available for permanent residents — versus a flat shared by many people, where the authorities are unlikely to act without a neighbour's complaint.

A late-19th-century building with wooden beams

Here comes the fact that reframes the matter. Several participants describe the property as a late-19th-century building with a wooden structure, a type of construction common in central Madrid, even in areas with absurd prices. Some estimate the property at around 213 m² subject to technical inspection. And another participant maintains that a wooden floor slab of that kind is nowhere near able to bear the 400 kilos per m² borne by a building with steel or reinforced concrete beams.

The technical account repeated most among participants combines two factors: lack of maintenance and renovations to create extra rooms. Moving partitions, building mezzanines, adding bathrooms without a declaración responsable (self-certification) or licence. “A building's floor doesn't give way unless it's rotten or overloaded,” sums up a widely repeated position, which adds an awkward caveat for the official narrative: in either case, it has nothing to do with whether it is a tourist flat or not.

What does change with intensive use is the load. If many more people than planned sleep in 213 m², with additional installations, the weight calculation stops being theoretical. It is the old problem of the cédula de habitabilidad (habitability certificate), that piece of paper that sets the maximum number of occupants and which, according to that same analysis, almost no one checks.

Why did no one check the licence before the collapse?

Because the sequence works late and often only at the prompting of a third party. Residential buildings more than 40 years old must undergo the Inspección Técnica de Edificios, the ITE (Technical Building Inspection), which assesses precisely the state of the structure. The recurring question is what peine with this building's inspection and with those of so many others on the same fifth floor in the centre.

The other link is oversight of tourist activity: whether the use is legal or not, who checks it and how often. Planning licences and inspections provide dates, but they do not prevent what no one reports. And that gap — between the written rule and the inspector's visit — is where improvisation slips in.

Invoicing without a licence: what about Hacienda (Spain's tax authority)?

A recurring part of the analysis dwells on the tax dimension. The suspicion, framed as a rhetorical question rather than a fact, is how an activity without a licence can generate declared or undeclared income for months without any authority cross-checking the paperwork. The answer circulating among participants is hardly edifying: the tax authority cares that tax is paid, not whether the business has a permit or not. However, in the available information there is no verification of the managing company's tax situation, nor any turnover figures.

What is on record is the acknowledgement that the accommodation lacked a licence and that the application was in process, as well as the absence of the address from the municipal list of authorised flats.

Tourism, housing and the underlying discontent

The case has acted as a trigger for a broader discontent: tourist saturation, pressure on residential rents and a feeling that the centre has become a theme park. It is argued, with examples such as the Canary Islands, that peak-season accommodation prices have risen by around 40% since 2019, and that flying to Rome in August went from about 150 euros to around 300. In that climate, some of the discontent is also directed at the migrant population, to whom an insecurity is attributed that the available data do not support; it is worth saying clearly, because that association is an opinion, not a finding.

Other analyses prefer to look at bricks and licences, which is where there are papers to read. The surprising coincidence is that almost no one defends the current state: neither those who attack tourism nor those who see only rotten beams.

With a late-19th-century floor slab, a licence that does not exist and a neighbour who was in his home when it fell on him, the question remains the same: how many more floors in central Madrid are holding up the same combination without anyone having looked at it yet?