Daniel Esteve is a former boxer, a self-defence teacher and an advocate for dog welfare. But in Spain, he is best known for something else. Esteve claims to have evicted squatters from more than 9,000 properties since 2016. When we meet in Valdemoro, a commuter town south of Madrid, he is congratulating himself on having vacated 30 flats of their residents — with the help of “15 giant guys and three dogs”. Although he says his tactics are legal, he flaunts the physicality of the job. “We made it clear to them that Valdemoro was a no-squatter town,” he smiles. He ordered his team to smash the kitchens and bathrooms, so that the squatters couldn’t return.
Esteve has helped to transform squatting into a major political controversy in Spain. He represents the confluence of bro podcasting and the property crisis. His social media videos reach millions. They mix macho footage of evictions with fierce criticisms of Spain’s Socialist-led government, criticisms which often echo those of the far right. Leftwing politicians have called for Esteve’s company Desokupa (literally, “Evict”) and other eviction firms to be banned.
Spain has become one of the most desired property locations in the world, attracting both wealthy second-home chasers and immigrants, particularly from elsewhere in Europe and Latin America. But the eviction companies hint at one of the market’s idiosyncrasies: some landlords and some tenants find themselves having to go to the edge of the law to protect their rights. Esteve even claims his clients include those with holiday homes and Airbnb flats: “You pay for two days and you stay for the whole year.” (Airbnb says reports of squatters in its properties are “exceptionally rare”, and it takes action when they occur.)
Esteve is not the only critic of the official response to squatting. “The government’s attitude is not to defend property owners . . . It minimises the problem. It’s shocking,” says Mikel Echavarren, head of property services company Colliers in Spain and Portugal. This month a new law came into force that should accelerate judicial evictions. Meanwhile, judges in Barcelona, the most affected city, announced in March that landlords have the right to cut off electricity, water and gas supply to properties with squatters.
There is fierce debate, however, over how widespread squatting is and whether a crackdown is the solution. Spain has one of the highest rates of “overburdened” renters in Europe: nearly 40 per cent of tenants spend at least 40 per cent of their income on housing. In the tussle between eviction firms and squatters, many Spaniards are siding with the latter.
Modern squatting dates back to the 1960s and 1970s. Today the issue is more politically salient in Spain than perhaps any other country, says Alexander Vasudevan, an associate geography professor at Oxford university. House prices tripled in Spain between 1998 and 2007, while the average number of mortgages granted each year crested at 1mn. At the same time, more homes were built each year than in Germany, France, the UK and Italy combined. When the country’s property bubble burst after 2008, hundreds of thousands of families had their homes foreclosed, while millions of flats stood empty. The country’s constitution includes a right to a dwelling. The public was furious at the banks that repossessed many flats. Squatting became a “tactic adopted by ordinary Spaniards”, says Vasudevan.
Later, during Covid, the government issued a decree protecting vulnerable families from eviction, unless they had alternative housing. That rule lives on — as does public ire at the banks. “If you don’t have somewhere to put your children, of course you should be able to kick down the door of a flat belonging to a bank,” Ione Belarra, leader of leftwing party Podemos, said recently.
Property owners complain that the balance has tipped too far. There were 16,426 reports of squatting in 2024, according to official figures. That was a 7 per cent rise from the previous year, but slightly below an all-time high in 2021. By comparison, when France looked at squatting between January and May 2021, it found just 124 reported cases, most of which were quickly resolved.
In Spain it’s not just banks that are affected: small landlords are swept up too. Many are pushed into hiring eviction companies that they find unsavoury. “People are realising that many squatters are not vulnerable and are taking advantage of the system,” says Ricardo Bravo, a teacher who runs the Platform of People Affected by Squatting (PAO). Bravo set up the group after his own flat was affected by squatting: “It was hell for eight years.”
Squatters in Spain are known as ocupas or okupas: the latter spelling tends to be more derogatory. It is a wide spectrum. At one extreme are leftwing idealists who turn old industrial buildings into community hubs. At the other are gangs who use empty flats to sell drugs. In the middle are those struggling to cope with the shortage of affordable housing.
Some new blocks of flats are targeted just before they’re handed to buyers. “There are mafias that know the delivery dates, and if the building doesn’t have security, there’s a huge risk that they get in,” says Echavarren.
In December last year, 30 families of “squatters” occupied a development in Madrid. But, according to reports, a gang had changed the locks then sold the new keys to immigrant families. Members of an eviction company were physically assaulted when they tried to enter the building. Eventually families were paid up to €10,000 each to leave, after two months of squatting. The building owner Vivenio declined to comment on the use of the eviction company, but said the situation had been resolved quickly.
Oxford’s Vasudevan adds that tenants may not know a property is illegally occupied when they sign a rental agreement: “The most vulnerable people are being targeted.”
Under the new law, the most brazen squatting — where people break into occupied homes or unoccupied homes (offences known as allanamiento and usurpación respectively) — should now be dealt with by the courts within 15 days. But this is unlikely to put eviction companies out of business. Thousands of properties are already occupied. “I could be doing this for 20 years,” says Desokupa’s Esteve.
The founder of another eviction business admits that such companies operate on the limit between the legal and the illegal. Desokupa insists it uses only legal tactics, such as surveilling the entrances to a building and blocking access. “It’s an exchange. I don’t report you, but you collect your things and go. And you aren’t asked to pay for the electricity supply that you used illegally,” says Esteve. He says he has been reported to the police hundreds of times, without conviction.
But as rents spiral, rising 14 per cent last year alone, even Esteve admits that eviction is an incomplete answer. “Of every eight flats that I recover, eight of the squatters find somewhere else to squat. I encounter the same squatters again many times.”
Perhaps the most controversial question about squatting in Spain is how common it is. Ministers insist that homeowners aren’t going on holiday to find their property taken over when they get back. They blame opposition politicians for exaggerating cases to portray the leftwing government as soft on crime and immigration.
“The issue is being used to alarm people,” housing minister Isabel Rodríguez said recently, pointing out that the 16,426 reports last year amount to 0.06 per cent of all Spain’s homes. “The problem is access [to housing].” Similarly, housing activists note that less than 10 per cent of squatting was in homes or second homes; most were in flats belonging to big landlords.
But landlords argue that the figures understate the problem, because many of those affected decide not to report squatting formally. Moreover, the figures don’t include cases of what they call inquiokupación — where a tenant enters legally, then stops paying rent or refuses a rent rise.
Mariano Ávila López is a nurse from Madrid’s neighbourhood of Vallecas. He says that his tenants have not paid rent since May 2023. After separating from his partner, he asked them to leave the property, so he could live there. They refused, saying that they couldn’t find anywhere in their budget.
The tenant family has teenage children and a low income; they qualify as vulnerable. A judicial eviction order was quashed. Ávila says he is now living in his mother’s flat, where he has to share a bedroom with his 14-year-old daughter. He has been through “rage, impotence, indignation”: “It’s not a question of right and left. It’s a question of it being my property.”
One tenant admitted that the family had stopped paying rent, but said they had been advised to do so because of a dispute with Ávila. The tenant also claimed that two men, claiming to be acting on Ávila’s behalf, had threatened her, demanding she leave. “We are afraid. We want to go now,” she added. Ávila said no such person had visited on his behalf.
For some property owners, the issue is not that their flat has been occupied, but that others in the same building have. One man, who asked not to be named, bought a flat in a block in the town of Ciempozuelos. After the property crisis, many of the other flats in the building were taken over by banks. He says they have subsequently been occupied by squatters, who have set up illegal electrical connections and who sell drugs from the property. “I wish I could sell [the flat]. But who wants to buy a place in a building like this?” he said.
Most flats in the building are owned by Sareb, the “bad bank” that took on assets from other banks following the property crisis. Sareb says that it has agreed low-cost rents with most of the residents — an alternative to eviction. But it is trying to evict four families. Across Spain, it has reported the occupants of 3,400 properties — nearly one-10th of its portfolio — on the basis that they are not tenants, not vulnerable and are not co-operating.
This is, however, not straightforward: Ruth Galán, an unemployed secretary, told me that Sareb was seeking to evict her, even though she had two young children. “Squatting is the only solution for many families,” she says. “I’ve had my things in boxes for a year . . . I’m going to fight to the end.”
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Resolving squatting disputes in court is often torturous, taking two years or more. Some landlords decide simply to sell up. One in every 40 homes for sale on the property site Idealista is listed as having squatters. “Perfect for investors and people specialised in eviction. Not possible to visit,” runs a typical listing. The buyer gets the property at a discount, and if they evict the squatter, takes the profit. But even here there are contrasting accounts. Some renters say they have found their properties advertised as having squatters, when in fact they have a legal contract to be there.
Last Saturday saw probably Spain’s biggest housing protest in years. Tens of thousands of people marched against soaring rents and the lack of social housing. The organisers’ demands included the break-up of eviction businesses, which they labelled “groups of goons”. They called on protesters to stop paying rent, a tactic that critics classify as squatting. Some marchers chanted: “Squat, and burst the housing bubble!” (The phrase half-rhymes in Spanish.) .
Housing is voters’ number one concern in Spain. Since 2022, the country has accumulated a deficit of 550,000 homes in regions including Madrid, Barcelona and the Balearic Islands.
Empty homes — the original targets for squatting — do still exist. In 2021, 3.8mn properties in Spain were considered empty — that is, they used less than a fortnight’s worth of electricity during the whole year. But many are not in the regions where people want to live. The ultimate answer to the problem lies in long-term solutions, such as building homes and improving transport links with other regions, says Montoriol, a property economist at CaixaBank, a big Spanish bank.
In the meantime, both left and right are looking to apportion blame. Pedro Sánchez, the prime minister, has targeted “vulture funds” and wealthy foreigners. He has proposed a 100 per cent property tax on non-EU, non-resident buyers (an idea that the national government currently lacks the means to implement). In a sign of the public mood, there was outrage over an asset manager’s plan to turn Casa Orsola, a block of flats in Barcelona, into luxury properties, asking the long-term residents to leave at the end of their contracts. The city government teamed up with a housing charity to buy the 27 flats at a significant cost of €9.2mn.
The hard right, meanwhile, has blamed the housing crisis on immigration and corruption. Esteve claims that most of those he evicts are not Spanish nationals.
Esteve has previously objected to the far-right party Vox for its promotion of bullfighting. But he is preparing to campaign with a former senior Vox figure, Iván Espinosa de los Monteros. “Spain is so lost . . . I think that it’s more important to save the country now than to deal with the issue of bullfighting.”
Already, the eviction companies are welcomed by some rightwing politicians and by law enforcement. In Valdemoro, Esteve received congratulations from the mayor, a member of the centre-right People’s Party. Esteve, who says he is always armed, has a close relationship with the police. He has a contract with a military association to train soldiers to work in private security.
Colliers’ Echavarren says legal changes, plus a potential political shift to the right, should reduce future squatting: “We’ve probably passed the peak of the problem.” Many on Saturday’s marches would disagree.
In recent months, viral stories about squatting have started to appear in the US. Florida changed its law to make squatting a criminal act. While there is no direct link to Spain, “we know the far right talk to each other”, says Vasudevan. The politics of Spain’s crisis may go global.
Henry Mance is the FT’s chief features writer
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