Two separate things happened within eleven months of each other, and owners in Fuerteventura are understandably mixing them up.
The first is national: since 3 April 2025, the Ley de Propiedad Horizontal gives a community of owners a straightforward, qualified-majority route to approve, condition or prohibit tourist letting inside the building. The second is regional: on 10 December 2025 the Canary Islands passed Ley 6/2025, de Ordenación Sostenible del Uso Turístico de Viviendas, which overrides the 2015 decree wherever the two conflict and rewrites the rules on which dwellings may be let to tourists at all.
They are not alternatives. A holiday let in a Fuerteventura apartment block now has to satisfy both — the community and the regional/municipal rulebook. The state registration regime that arrived in 2025 no longer sits on top of them: the Supreme Court annulled it in May 2026 (more on that below).
What the 2025 reform actually says
The reform arrived through the fourth final provision of Ley Orgánica 1/2025, which rewrote article 17.12 of the LPH. The operative words are worth reading in the original:
"El acuerdo expreso por el que se apruebe, limite, condicione o prohíba el ejercicio de la actividad [...] requerirá el voto favorable de las tres quintas partes del total de los propietarios que, a su vez, representen las tres quintas partes de las cuotas de participación."
In plain English: an express agreement to approve, limit, condition or prohibit tourist letting needs a double three-fifths majority — three-fifths of all owners, who between them hold three-fifths of the participation quotas. Not unanimity. Not simple majority. And "of all owners", not "of those who turned up".
Three consequences follow, and they matter more than the headline.
It cuts both ways
A double three-fifths majority could already limit or condition holiday lets since 2019, and in October 2024 the Supreme Court held that it could prohibit them too; the 2025 reform wrote that into the Act. What it added is the other half: the old assumption that the activity is free unless banned is gone, and the law now speaks of express and prior approval. An owner who wants to start letting in a multi-family building can no longer treat the community as an irrelevance.
"Limit or condition" is the underused option
Most communities do not want a ban. They want the bins emptied, the pool not turned into a party venue at 2 a.m., and the lift not carrying wheeled suitcases at six in the morning. The same article allows the community to condition the activity — house rules, key-handover arrangements, a designated contact for each let unit — with the same three-fifths majority. That is very often the agreement that actually passes.
The cost can be shared differently
The same article also allows the community to set a special expense quota, or an increased share of common expenses, for the dwelling carrying on the activity — capped at a 20% increase. It reflects something every administrator can measure: a unit with fifty guest turnovers a year uses the lift, the corridors and the pool differently from a unit with one family in it.
What about lets already running?
The Act answers in two places. Article 17.12 ends with the words Estos acuerdos no tendrán efectos retroactivos, these agreements shall have no retroactive effect. And the 2025 reform added a second additional provision for the owner who was already letting to tourists before 3 April 2025 under the tourism rules: that owner podrá seguir ejerciendo la actividad con las condiciones y plazos establecidos en la misma, may go on with the activity on the conditions and for the periods those rules lay down. A let that was lawfully running before that date therefore does not need the community's approval to go on; for how long is decided by the Canary law described below. Two limits remain. Neither rule, as we read them, rescues a let that the title or the statutes already prohibited. And how far a later agreement can condition an older let, or charge it the higher quota, the Act does not say in so many words. It depends on your constitutive title, your statutes and how the agreement is drafted — which is exactly why the drafting is worth doing properly.
Then the Canary Islands added its own law
Ley 6/2025 is the bigger structural change for Fuerteventura, because it decides whether the dwelling can be a holiday let at all — before the community ever votes.
The main lines:
- A cap per municipality. As a general rule at least 90% of a municipality's housing stock is reserved for residential use, leaving up to 10% available for tourist use. The margin is wider (20%) only in El Hierro, La Gomera and La Palma. Fuerteventura sits under the general rule.
- New buildings wait. Newly built homes cannot go to tourist use for ten years after construction (five in the lower-pressure islands and in municipalities with demographic difficulties).
- Real technical standards. Minimum floor area (35 m² of usable area; a smaller home that meets the legal minimum for a dwelling qualifies only with one of a list of extras, such as a parking space or a pool for guests), bathroom counts scaled to occupancy, and an energy performance floor — broadly rating F for pre-2007 buildings and D for later ones — plus renewable hot water and accessibility compliance. Several older Fuerteventura apartments will need work, not paperwork.
- A transitional period. Existing viviendas vacacionales may go on for five years from the law's entry into force, to December 2030, extendable once to ten on application; an owner who is also the registered operator, with more than a year of activity before the law, can instead declare uso turístico consolidado, which carries no time limit but ends if the property changes hands. Since August 2026 one date comes first: an owner who registered before the law without filing the classified-activity notice (comunicación previa) at the town hall must file it before 31 July 2027 or stop (Ley 7/2026).
- No more pseudo-hotels. Planning may not make holiday letting the main use of a plot, and a flat in a building that was licensed as a tourist establishment counts as a hotel unit, not as a home that can be registered.
- Licences stop travelling with the sale. The consolidated use ends when the property is transferred by any title; since August 2026 the one exception is an inheritance, where the heir may take over the declaration for up to ten years — a point that changes the arithmetic for anyone buying a flat "with a rental licence". Verify it before you pay for it.
And underneath both, a layer that has just fallen away: Real Decreto 1312/2024 created a single national rental registry and a digital single window, and from 1 July 2025 short-stay listings needed a state registration number. On 19 May 2026 the Supreme Court (judgment 620/2026, Third Chamber) annulled the registry and the duty to register — tourism and housing are regional powers — leaving only the digital window and the platforms' duty to report rental data to the State. A state number is no longer a condition for advertising; the registration that carries your right to operate is the Canarian one. The era in which a holiday let could simply not exist administratively is still over — the register that matters has just moved to the islands.
What this means for you, depending on who you are
If you own a flat in a community and let it to tourists. Check three things in this order: whether the dwelling still qualifies under Ley 6/2025 and your municipality's numbers, whether your Canarian registration is valid and the town hall has the classified-activity notice (comunicación previa) the law asks for by 31 July 2027, and what your community's statutes and minutes already say. A prohibition may already exist in your statutes from long before 2025.
If you are a president or on the board. The three-fifths threshold is measured against all owners and all quotas — which in a community where half the owners live abroad means the vote is won or lost on participation, not on opinion. An agreement voted by fourteen people in a community of sixty will not reach it. This is the single most practical reason to run a convocation properly: proper notice, the agenda item drafted in the law's own language, the proxy form circulated early, and a real effort to reach non-resident owners in a language they read.
If you own in the building and object to the lets. You now have a route that does not require your neighbour's consent. Ask the president to put an express agreement on the agenda, and be realistic about which version — approve with conditions, limit, or prohibit — can actually gather three-fifths.
How we handle it
We are administrators, not lawyers, and we say so. What we do is make the decision procedurally sound: the convocation drafted so the agreement is not challengeable on a technicality, the majority calculated against the real quota table before the meeting rather than after it, proxies chased so the threshold is reachable, and the minutes written so they say what was actually decided. Where a community needs formal legal work — a statute modification, a challenge, a claim — we say that too and it gets quoted in writing before it starts. That is what our legal support service is for.
Owners who live abroad see the whole of it through their own login: the convocation when it goes out, the proxy form ready to sign, the agenda item in English, Spanish or German, and the minutes when they are closed. Voting on the future of your building should not depend on whether you happen to be on the island in March.
If your community is heading into this conversation and you would rather it were run properly, tell us about your community — or read what our community administration service covers.
