How many holiday lets are there in my building?
You count it by grouping the register on the first 14 characters of the cadastral reference, which identify the building. In our mirror of the official register, 30,821 parcels hold two or more registered holiday lets. Only Andalusia, the Valencian Community and Murcia publish that reference, so elsewhere the question has no answer.
How a building gets counted
A dwelling's cadastral reference is 20 characters and names that flat. Its first 14 name the parcel - the plot and the building standing on it. Everything else follows from that: registrations whose reference starts with the same 14 characters are in the same building, and counting them is grouping on that prefix.
There is nothing cleverer behind it, deliberately. We do not match addresses or look for near misses. "Calle Mayor 12" might be the building, the ground floor or flat 3B, and registers hold all three differently, so a count built on fuzzy address matching would be an invented number wearing the clothes of a fact.
What we tell you, and what we do not
The count for your building, and the band it falls into. Not your neighbours' registration codes, not their addresses, not who is named as the holder of each one. That line is not squeamishness: a count is a conclusion about the building, whereas a list of codes and holders is the register itself served to anyone who asks.
The holder, the phone number and the email we do not even keep. Several registers publish them - Catalonia carries the holder's tax number and surnames, Navarra the booking email and phone - and our ingest drops them before the row is written, because none of it is needed to answer whether a licence is valid, and what is never stored cannot leak later through a permissions mistake.
What the register says today
Grouping our mirror on that 14-character prefix gives 104,619 parcels holding at least one registered holiday let. 30,821 hold two or more, and between them those cover 188,842 registrations. The most crowded parcel in the mirror holds 624.
So most buildings are not saturated with anything: three in four parcels appear with a single registration. These figures move with every overnight load, which is why every answer carries the snapshot date beside it.
- 1 registration - 73,798 parcels
- 2 to 4 registrations - 20,679 parcels
- 5 to 9 registrations - 5,862 parcels
- 10 to 24 registrations - 3,173 parcels
- 25 or more registrations - 1,107 parcels
Why the count is a floor, not a total
Only three regional registers publish a cadastral reference per entry. Andalusia carries one on 94% of the rows in our mirror, the Valencian Community on 99% and Murcia on 72%. Every other Spanish register publishes none at all, so in Madrid, Catalonia, the Balearics, the Canaries or anywhere else, this question cannot be answered. That is not your building coming back clean: it is the register not saying which building it is talking about.
Even where it is published, a row that arrives without a reference cannot be placed in any building, and a home let without being registered is not in the register at all. The count is therefore a floor and not a ceiling. It counts registered holiday lets, which is not the same thing as holiday lets.
A high count is not a breach
Worth saying flatly, because it is the reading everyone arrives at on their own. Twenty registrations in your building does not make any of the twenty illegal, yours included. Each one has its own entry in the register, and it is that entry - not the neighbours - that decides whether the activity is covered.
What we give you is descriptive: how many are on record. It is not a compliance verdict, it does not forecast a penalty, and it should never appear in an advert as though it were either.
Why it can matter anyway
Because the two decisions that can actually switch the activity off in your flat are not taken about your flat. Since 2025, the Horizontal Property Law lets the community of owners ban tourist letting on a three-fifths majority of owners who also hold three-fifths of the participation quotas - and that meeting is your building's.
The other is municipal and is drawn over the neighbourhood rather than the building: Málaga froze new registrations for three years from July 2026 across 43 neighbourhoods where tourist housing exceeds 8% of the housing stock. Knowing how many sit around you does not tell you how your community will vote or what your town hall will do, but it is the figure you want before walking into either conversation.
How not to be left with a still photograph
A count is a snapshot, and snapshots age. What changes your situation is a new registration appearing in your block, or one that disappears, and that is only visible by comparing loads.
That is what the free plan is for: one property, yours, checked against the official register every night, with the same alerts agencies get. For ever, no card. You do not need a portfolio for this to be worth doing - you need one home you care about.
Check a licence number
Free, no sign-up, nothing stored. Try VUT/MA/102186.
Sources
- Catastro online office - cadastral reference lookup — the structure of the reference - 20 characters per property, the first 14 per parcel
- Registro de Turismo de Andalucía (OpenRTA), open data CC BY 4.0 — publishes a cadastral reference per entry, which is what makes grouping by building possible
- Registre de Turisme de la Comunitat Valenciana, GVA open data (CC BY)
- ITREM public register — the Murcia mirror source
- Registre de Turisme de Catalunya, Generalitat open data — publishes no cadastral reference, and does publish the holder's tax number and surnames, which we do not ingest
- Registro de Turismo de Navarra, open data — carries booking email and phone, which we do not ingest either
- Ley 49/1960 de Propiedad Horizontal, art. 17.12 — the three-fifths majority a community uses to ban the activity
- Málaga PGOU amendment (modificación puntual 28), BOP of 24 July 2026 — the 43 neighbourhoods above 8% of the housing stock; the bulletin keeps no permanent link per notice, so search it by that date
Verified against the sources above on 2026-09-27. LicenceDesk is operational guidance, not legal advice.
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