On 23 September 2026, in the Retiro district of Madrid, court officials and police evicted Maricarmen Abascal, 87, from the flat her family had rented since 1956. She was carried out on a stretcher. She had paid her rent every month.
If her mother had died one year earlier, the law would have let her stay for life. What kind of rule decides that by the date of a mother's death?
Seventy years in one flat. Two years left on paper.
She paid about €500 a month, every month. The owner's claim in court was never about a debt: it said the lease had simply run out.
The owner is Urbagestión, a small Madrid company with about seven employees; its owners told a Spanish newspaper this building is their only property. It turned down an offer from a stranger to pay her rent, and an offer from the public housing company CASA 47 to buy the flat. That was its right. But no landlord can evict anyone without a court.
27 January 2022 — the first court sided with her: the earlier owners had taken her rent for years and treated her as their tenant.
30 June 2022 — the Madrid appeals court split the case in two. Did she legally take over her mother's lease? Yes. How long could it last after that? Two years.
13 December 2023 — the Supreme Court refused to hear her appeal: the dispute was about how long the lease could run, not whether she had inherited it.
Her father signed the lease in 1956 under the old rules: renewable for life, rent almost frozen, and the family could take it over when the tenant died. In Spain this is renta antigua, old rent. Her mother took it over in 1960: the first handover.
The 1994 reform (in force from 1 January 1995) gave these leases a last day by counting deaths. Anyone who had taken over a lease before the reform kept it for life. After that person died, one child could take it over once more, and the lease would end two years later. Her mother died in 2005; by the letter of the law, Maricarmen's lease ended in 2007.
The law had two ways out. The first: a disability of 65% or more kept the lease until that child's own death. Maricarmen's official disability was 50%.
The second way out was a window in time. If the handover happened within ten years of 1 January 1995, and the child taking over was over 65 or already retired, the lease lasted for life. Maricarmen had been retired since 1998. The window closed on 1 January 2005. Her mother died later that year.
For a lease whose previous holder had taken it over before 1995, passed to their child (paragraphs 5 and 8).
A counter of deaths, a line at 65%, and a calendar.
On paper the lease ended in 2007. The family who owned the building kept taking her rent for another eleven years; the appeals court later called it a lease renewed silently, year by year, which the owner could end at the close of any year. In 2018 a new owner bought the flat and chose to end it: it asked her to prove a 65% disability, offered a new rent of €1,650 a month, more than her pension, and went to court when she refused.
She paid about €5 per square metre; in 2026, comparable flats in the same district were listed at four to seven times as much. The promise of a flat for life at an old price was made by the state, in law, but the monthly difference was paid by whoever owned the flat. In 2026, estimates put the number of old-rent leases still alive in Spain at around 150,000, all signed before the mid-1980s.
The 1994 reform kept that cost on owners for one more generation, then moved all of it onto one tenant, in one day. Is there a way to end a promise like this that does not land like that?
Portugal: freeze for the vulnerable. From 2012 old leases moved toward market rents, but stayed frozen for tenants over 65, with a serious disability, or on low incomes; in 2023 the freeze became permanent. Maricarmen would still be at home. Price: owners keep paying. By a government study they carry about €650 million a year; the state pays back about €27 million, around 4%. In July 2026 the government proposed ending the freeze and paying poorer tenants a subsidy instead.
France: a clock based on income. Under its old-rent law an owner can raise the rent to the market over eight years, but only for tenants above an income limit; tenants over 65 keep their right to stay. Price: time. It took half a century for these leases to shrink from half of all rentals to a few thousand, and owners of poor and old tenants carry the gap until then.
The public pays directly. Catalonia and the Balearic Islands give the regional government the right to buy certain homes first when they are sold, then rent them at social prices. Price: public money at market prices; the right works only when an owner decides to sell; and it is fragile in court: in Berlin a federal court narrowed it in 2021 and its use almost stopped.
Maricarmen did not lose her home because of anything she did. She lost it because a rule written in 1994 measured her by the date of her mother's death, and the only thing that delayed it for eleven years was that no owner chose to use it.
When a state makes a promise with someone else's money, ask who pays while it lasts — and what decides when it ends: a death in the family, an income, or an age.