María del Carmen Abascal will be able to return home after a preliminary agreement with the company that owns her building in Madrid, easing a case that had turned into one of the clearest symbols of Spain’s housing anger. The 87-year-old, who had lived in the apartment for seven decades, was evicted and carried out on a stretcher before being hospitalized on Wednesday.
The agreement reached on Monday night would cap her rent at 30% of her income, meaning she would not pay more than 500 euros a month, roughly the amount she had paid before the dispute escalated. That matters because it gives Abascal a way back into the apartment her father first rented in 1956, after the building changed ownership in 2018 and Urbagestión pushed the rent from 500 euros to 2,650 euros before later lowering it to 1,650 euros.
Her case has landed in the middle of a broader fight over housing in Spain, where protesters camped out in Madrid’s Puerto del Sol were still waiting on details from the government on the third night of the encampment. Smaller protest camps had also appeared in Seville, Málaga, Santiago de Compostela and Palma de Mallorca, showing how quickly the anger has spread beyond one building and one tenant.
That spread is what makes Abascal’s return only a partial answer. The preliminary deal appears to settle her immediate problem, but it does not settle the wider one driving the protests: rising costs, a housing shortage and demands for stronger tenant protections, including limits on evictions when no alternative housing is available. Spain already has a housing law in place since 2023, and it allows rent caps in high-demand areas at the request of local governments, but protesters say that has not gone far enough.
Spain’s left-wing coalition government led by Pedro Sánchez was expected to present its decree at 4 p.m. ET, and that made Tuesday a key moment for people watching the protests in Madrid and beyond. The question now is not whether Abascal gets back inside, but whether the deal around her apartment becomes a one-off fix or another reminder that the country’s housing crisis is still pushing people into the street.
