Seville vs Valencia: Two Very Different Maps of Holiday Rentals

Citywide totals suggest two comparable markets. Seville records 6,937 advertised holiday rentals; Valencia records 5,393. Measured against the total number of homes, neither figure looks extraordinary: 2.12% in Seville, 1.30% in Valencia.

Look closer, however, and that similarity disappears.

In Seville, tourist accommodation is crowded into a compact historic core, where holiday apartments compete directly with residential life on ancient medieval streets. Valencia has taken an entirely different shape: holiday rentals are distributed across maritime quarters, the old town, and residential districts kilometres inland.

This contrast matters. When cities debate tourism limits and neighbourhood balance, citywide averages conceal where pressure actually falls. In Seville, the impact is intensely localized; in Valencia, it is an urban-wide reality.

In Seville, holiday accommodation is almost entirely an old-town phenomenon.

Casco Antiguo alone holds more than two-thirds of the city's listings, packed into just 47 census sections. Add neighbouring Triana across the Guadalquivir, and four out of every five holiday rentals in Seville sit within a single central pocket.

At street level, the concentration is intense. In 31 census sections, holiday rentals make up more than a tenth of residential housing, rising above 20% in seven sections. The peak is in the Alfalfa neighbourhood around Plaza de la Pescaderia, where nearly three out of every ten homes are tourist rentals (29.4%). Similar saturation extends across Santa Cruz, San Bartolome, and Feria.

Step outside the centre, and the market largely disappears. Nearly a third of Seville's census sections record not a single advertised holiday rental, while populous suburban districts such as Cerro - Amate and Este - Alcosa average fewer than three listings per thousand homes.

Valencia tells the opposite story: holiday rentals are spread across almost the entire city, with no single neighbourhood dominating the market.

Its largest cluster is along the Mediterranean coast rather than the historic centre. The maritime district of Poblats Maritims leads with roughly 1,000 rentals (18.6%), closely followed by the old town of Ciutat Vella with around 930 (17.2%). Substantial shares also appear across Quatre Carreres, Camins al Grau, Extramurs, and L'Eixample.

Because listings are distributed across multiple hubs, extreme neighbourhood saturation is almost non-existent. Across all 591 census sections in Valencia, only one exceeds 10% density: a single section in the seaside quarter of El Cabanyal (14.3%). Even in Ciutat Vella, no individual section reaches double digits.

At the same time, holiday accommodation is present in more than 90% of Valencia's census sections. Where Seville concentrates intense pressure in a compact core and leaves outer districts untouched, Valencia disperses visitors across its wider urban fabric.

To see how these two patterns diverge, we examined three comparative measures across all 1,112 census sections:

Sorting census sections by volume illustrates how differently the two cities absorb visitors. Seville's top tier concentrates more than 5,200 holiday rentals in just 52 sections - a volume comparable to the entire holiday market of many provincial capitals, compressed into a handful of streets. In Valencia, the equivalent top 10% of areas account for less than half the city's supply, ensuring that the majority of tourist accommodation is absorbed across ordinary residential quarters.

A 10% share - where at least one in every ten homes is an advertised holiday rental - is widely treated by urban planners as a threshold where neighbourhood dynamics noticeably change. In Seville, 31 sections cross this line, forming an unbroken corridor of tourist accommodation through the historic centre. In Valencia, only a single section meets this criterion, isolated in a former fishing quarter beside the port.

Casco Antiguo exercises an overwhelming dominance over Seville's holiday market, holding nearly four times the market share of Valencia's leading district.

Holiday rentals are much more concentrated in a handful of areas in Seville than in Valencia. This is reflected in each city's Gini coefficient, a measure of how evenly accommodation is spread across neighbourhoods, from 0 (spread evenly across the entire city) to 1 (concentrated in a single area). Seville's score of 0.829 confirms heavy geographic concentration, whereas Valencia's score of 0.591 shows supply distributed more broadly across the city.

To interpret these findings responsibly, several important distinctions should be kept in mind:

• Advertised listings are not the same as licensed tourist apartments. The INE counts dwellings marketed on major booking platforms in May 2026. This data does not indicate whether an apartment holds an official municipal license, complies with regional planning decrees, or was actively occupied during the period.
• The data tracks location, not economic impact. The statistics show where holiday rentals cluster, not whether they have driven up residential rents or displaced local tenants. Determining what would have happened to these homes without tourism requires separate economic research.
• Geography reflects city layout, not just policy. Why accommodation clusters where it does involves historic pedestrian routes, proximity to monuments, beaches, transit links, and traditional retail, alongside any municipal rules in force.
• Census sections measure people, not square kilometres. Spain's census sections are designed around population (typically 1,000 to 2,000 residents) rather than geographic size. Ten percent of sections refers to the top slice of populated administrative units, not a tenth of the city's physical land area.
• Areas where figures are withheld for privacy. Under Spanish Law 12/1989, the INE withholds percentages for sparsely populated or sensitive areas (marked nota4: Dato protegido por secreto estadistico) to protect individual privacy. Seven sections (one in Seville, six in Valencia) fall under this rule. Their listing counts are included in all totals, but local density is not calculated.
• Matching areas to census boundaries. Platform listings from May 2026 are matched against the INE's 2021 census boundaries. Seven outer sections created after 2021 are included in city totals, but do not have separate boundary outlines on the 2021 map layer.

Public debates over holiday rentals almost always focus on citywide numbers. Yet as Seville and Valencia show, similar municipal totals can conceal two entirely different urban realities.

In Seville, tourist accommodation is concentrated into a historic centre where holiday rentals rival ordinary housing, while outer neighbourhoods remain largely untouched. In Valencia, supply is woven across maritime, historic, and residential quarters throughout the city.

The data cannot resolve whether one pattern is better than the other. But it demonstrates something fundamental: citywide averages disguise where urban pressure actually falls. Any policy that treats a city as a uniform market will fail to address the streets where it matters most.