Although Lisbon City Council closed its doors to new local accommodation, when it implemented absolute containment zones in 2019, it left the door open to the hotel sector, which, in the following four years, opened 41 hotels in these parishes, reveals Rádio Renascença, cites ECO.

These establishments, according to data from Turismo de Portugal, are equivalent to 1,979 rooms to accommodate 3,248 tourists.

The phenomenon is most visible in the parishes of Santa Maria Maior and Santo António, where, between 2020 and 2023, 21 and 11 hotels were opened, respectively. In the same period, 36 local accommodation units were registered in the absolute containment zone, which, in total, have the capacity to accommodate 315 people. This means that, since 2019, new hotel units have been worth ten times more than local accommodation in terms of capacity in places that were considered saturated with tourism.

The regulations of the capital's local authority began to define the new restrictions on local accommodation in November 2019, when Fernando Medina was still mayor. With the “growing demand for real estate, [which] led to a sharp rise in rents and precarious accommodation”, it became “necessary to implement a set of public urban policies, with a view, in particular, to defending the permanent housing stock and limiting the installation of new tourist establishments in neighbourhoods where their presence already has an excessive weight in relation to the total available housing”, was the justification that came at the time.