Spain’s tourism sector continues to solidify itself as a critical pillar of its economy based on recent data from the 2025 Contribution Atlas of Municipal Tourism in Spain. This second edition of the Atlas reveals a significant increase in tourism-related employment, growing by 19.3% in 2024 compared to 2022, covering 500 destinations across the nation.

The supply and demand for tourism are mainly concentrated in more established municipalities, where both the positive effects and challenges of tourism coexist with local residents. The top 50 municipalities with the highest tourism activity account for 40.9% of all accommodation supply in the market, including hotels, apartments, campgrounds, rural tourism, and tourist residences.

A key factor in this growth is the substantial increase in tourist accommodation offerings, which have grown by 25.3% between 2024 and 2022 in the 500 municipalities analyzed. This sharp rise contrasts with a modest 2.0% increase in hotel capacity and 1.4% in other regulated lodging options, such as campgrounds and rural homes.

However, the fight against illegal offerings in tourism remains a significant challenge as we head into 2025. Approximately 65,000 illegal listings have been identified, equating to 250,000 tourist spaces—a number comparable to all the hotel accommodations in cities like Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Sevilla, and Málaga. To tackle this issue, there’s an urgent need to implement a digital one-stop window for rentals, ensuring that platforms only advertise legal registered offers.

Against this backdrop, Exceltur has presented a ‘Decalogue to Address the Challenges of Established Spanish Destinations,’ emphasizing the need for public administrations to prioritize investments in management and promotion systems that encourage more sustainable tourism beneficial to local communities’ quality of life. This approach contrasts with punitive and restrictive measures proposed in some regions.

The decalogue includes ten key points to tackle these challenges, such as investing in knowledge to direct and manage demand efficiently, developing urban planning tools that balance tourism supply with residents’ quality of life, prioritizing professional management systems over access limitations, renewing tourist infrastructure and services, combating illegal tourism services, promoting civility through appropriate regulations, creating new tourist products to redistribute demand, reorienting tourism promotions towards more desirable profiles, establishing participatory governance that combines public-private efforts, and solidifying a fair tax framework in the tourism sector.

As tourism continues to evolve, implementing these recommendations will be crucial in ensuring that its socio-economic impact remains sustainable and beneficial for all stakeholders involved in this dynamic landscape.