Spain's 2025 reform lets a community approve, limit or ban tourist lets with a 3/5 vote, and the Canary Islands added its own law. Where that leaves owners.
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 replaces the old 2015 decree 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 — and, on top of that, the national registration regime that came into force in 2025.
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.
Before the reform, a community that wanted to ban holiday lets needed unanimity — which meant, in practice, that it could not. That barrier is gone. But so is the old assumption that the activity is free unless banned: 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.
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 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.
This is where honest answers are short. The reform contains no express transitional rule, and legal opinion is genuinely divided on whether a new community agreement can stop an activity that was already lawfully under way before 3 April 2025. Anyone who tells you the answer is obvious in either direction is selling you certainty that does not exist yet. It depends on your constitutive title, your statutes and how the agreement is drafted — which is exactly why the drafting is worth doing properly.
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:
And underneath both: Real Decreto 1312/2024 created a single national rental registry and a digital single window. Since 1 July 2025 short-stay listings need a registration number, and the platforms report activity. The era in which a holiday let could simply not exist administratively is over.
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 you hold the registration number, 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.
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.
