After seven months, Jesús Nebreda, 38, can return home. , right in the center, and which threatened to cost him his life on the April day when it collapsed on top of his living room while he was sleeping. The cause? Some works that the hotel businessman carried out, also illegally, with which he rotted and overloaded the wooden beam slab that divides the ceiling of the Nebreda home from the ground that the tourists who were staying there to spend a few days in the capital of Spain walked on. Despite this serious incident and the fact that a cessation order has been imposed on that accommodation since 2024, it has continued to operate without interruption until EL PAÍS revealed what happened in a report published in November.
That same day two things happened that seem incompatible. When asked by the press, he responded that the hostel had not been closed because the businessman had made allegations about the order that the City Council gave him in 2024 to close it. “Then comes the sealing order, but the last step had not been reached,” the popular councilor said on October 21. However, as this newspaper has now learned, just a few hours after he uttered those words, it seemed to be achieved. The Activities Agency, which depends on the Carabante government area, opened a file for forced execution of that cessation order. Either the owner closed it, or the Local Police went to the door to seal it, as ended up happening almost a month later, on November 19.
Also on the day the report was published, the Madrid City Council included in the file the formal complaint that Más Madrid had presented to request that action be taken once and for all. Eduardo Rubiño, who serves as acting spokesperson for the municipal group, believes that the City Council has been “fucking about” for months and that “it only acts against illegal tourist accommodation if it feels political pressure.”
Jesús Nebreda, who finally sees the light at the end of the tunnel after months of moving heaven and earth to recover his house, shares the same perception as Rubiño. “I feel very relieved and very grateful,” he says, “but I also think that if I had not contacted the press we would still be the same.” “The Madrid City Council is not going to act until it is under pressure to do so,” he protests.
Even so, Nebreda still cannot return home because in the living room there are still the nine struts that the firefighters placed after the collapse to form a provisional structure to support the weight of the floor above.
The next step is to approve a settlement at the neighborhood meeting to fix the structure, since the owner of the hostel, for the moment, has refused to pay, understanding that the collapse is not his fault. “The collapse has nothing to do with the closure order,” he told this newspaper. After carrying out the works to recondition the building, which the Madrid City Council requires for safety, the next step, says Nebreda, will be to sue him to return the money advanced by the rest of the neighbors.
The hostel above the house consisted of 10 rooms and 10 completely new bathrooms. Nebreda blames the works that were done to install them for the fact that the beams were rotten due to humidity. “There had never been any major water leaks until then,” he points out. The reason for the overload, according to the report drawn up by City Hall experts following the collapse, was that the owner had thickened the floor of the hostel by 15 centimeters to install a network of pipes that would radiate heat.
The Nebreda case is perhaps one of the extreme examples of a fairly common situation. At the end of 2024, in Madrid there were more than . That is, nine out of every 10 houses found on platforms such as Booking or Airbnb did not have a license to operate. The data is only an estimate made by the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, but the exact figure is unknown due to the difficulty of locating homes that operate outside the law.
Compared to that figure, the Madrid City Council only imposed 92 sanctions throughout 2024 on holiday apartments that acted without the license that enables them to do so. At that time there were only 1,131 homes of this type in operation that had the approval of municipal inspectors and, therefore, with all the safety guarantees.
