city council

The iconic Barcelona landmark will be easier to reach, but with raised ticket prices

The local council shows its commitment to the biggest fair in the city with a grant of 5 million a year until 2022

For the day of books and roses on April 23, the City Council has made agreements to desaturate the most crowded areas

Catalan capital is among the top 10 cities with the most foreign investment projects in the past four years

With the election over, the local authority decides to show solidarity with Catalan officials still held in preventive custody

The electoral body argues that the message of the poster “affects the neutrality of government institutions”

Council confident event will"continue" in city, while organizers are “monitoring” situation recalling that contract ends in 2023

The entity supports the incarcerated “legitimate” government of Catalonia and rejects Spain’s “repressive escalation”

The Torre de Glòries, an emblematic modern tower widely known as the “Torre Agbar”, with its 33.000 square meters and distinguished design by Jean Novel, is Barcelona's candidate for the new location for the European Medicines Agency (EMA) headquarters. The decision was made last Friday by the representatives of the City of Barcelona, the Government of Catalonia, and the Spanish government. The Mayoress of Barcelona, Ada Colau, the Spanish Minister of Healthcare, Dolors Montserrat, and the Catalan Minister of Health, Antoni Comín had already agreed to join forces for the promotion of the Catalan capital’s candidacy in an earlier meeting two weeks ago.

Barcelona City Council will allocate almost €4.5 million for the maintenance, restoration and enhancement of the architectural heritage of Antoni Gaudí’s famous Park Güell and its surroundings. This investment comes from the fee charged to enter the park, but also partly from the city tourist tax, Barcelona Councillor for Architecture Daniel Mòdol stated. Since October 2013, tourists visiting the spot have had to pay an entrance fee. The Councillor of Gràcia District in Barcelona, Eloi Badia, explained that the remodelling aims at controlling the influx of visitors and recovering the daily life of the neighbourhood as well as the cultural and commercial activity of the area. According to Badia, many neighbours believe that they have to pay to enter the enclosure, but locals are not charged. “We want neighbours to understand that they can access [the park] for free, and we want to recover the cultural and daily activities”, he stressed.

This Friday’s plenary session at Barcelona City Hall resulted in the reprobation of Mayor Ada Colau. All the parties in the Chamber except from the governing alternative left alliance ‘Barcelona en Comú’ and radical left pro-independence CUP criticised Colau’s “politics of gesture”. “Today your government was defeated, the majority in the chamber censors your way of governing and is telling you that we can’t continue like this”, stated liberal CiU’s spokesman in Barcelona City Hall, Joaquim Forn. Moreover, Forn committed to discussing with all the groups in the Chamber how “to build an alternative majority to the current government”. Colau, a former activist especially committed to fighting evictions, won the local elections in May last year. However, she only obtained 11 seats, just one more than the second most voted list, CiU.

Barcelona’s battle against illegal apartment rentals has recently taken a new turn.The European Holiday Home Association (EHHA) filed last Thursday a formal complaint with the European Commission against the “restrictions” on the renting of apartments for tourists in Barcelona. The city launchedlast July an action plan against illegal tourist accommodations. Residents consider them to be the main cause for the presence of tourists in quiet neighbourhoods and the disruption of neighbours’ tranquillity. Up to 30 million people visit Barcelona each year. Although tourism represents a significant revenue stream, the increasing number of reported incidents of noise, public urination and nudity in some spots is too much to handle. Barcelona’s action plan aims at detecting illegal sublets as well as denouncing platforms such as Airbnb and HomeAway for offering them on their platforms. The City Council has threatened to fine the websites €600,000 each, despite Airbnb contributing €740 million to Barcelona´s revenue in 2015. 

Visitors coming to Barcelona in 2017 may be levied with a tourist tax. This would be added to the fee Catalonia already applies to people staying in Catalan hotels, camping sites and tourist cottages. The Municipal Commission of Economy and Finance passed on Tuesday a proposal presented by liberal ‘Convergència i Unió’ (CiU) in which the political party asks the local government to consider the application of a tourist tax, fee or public levy. The aim is to balance the costs and benefits of receiving around 30 million visitors each year. The text approved also insists on the necessity of demanding from the Catalan Government the transfer of all the revenue collected from tourists visiting the city, and not just half of it.

The City Council of the Catalan capital has announced it will remit 80% of the fine on tourist apartments with no licence located in Barcelona's Ciutat Vella district if the owners put the property up for social housing rent for a minimum of 3 years. Once this period is over, the owner will be able to extend the social rent or pay the remaining 20% of the fine. The City Council explained that the initiative is "a pilot test" in order "to start changing the city's tourist model", as tourists are too concentrated in some areas. This has created some friction with locals, mostly due to some visitors' wild street parties and to the rise in rent prices, as many properties have been transformed into tourist rentals, quite often without a licence. In this vein, the City Council will ask digital platforms such as Airbnb for the identification data of all their rentals in Barcelona. These platforms will be fined for each illegal flat on offer or if they refuse to issue the requested list.

Barcelona will continue to host each year the world's main event of the mobile phone-related industries until at least 2023, it has been confirmed by the company organising the Mobile World Congress, GSMA, on Tuesday through a press release. “We are very pleased to confirm that Barcelona will continue to serve as the Mobile World Capital and home of the Mobile World Congress for the next eight years”, stated the CEO of GSMA, John Hoffman. The Catalan capital has been uninterruptedly hosting this annual event since 2006 and has been declared the Mobile World Capital, as the project goes beyond the congress and involves the development of a business environment focused on this type of industry at international level. The current contract was due to end in 2018 and a few months ago Barcelona officially told GSMA it was willing to continue hosting the event until 2023.