Cabanyal: The complaint that isn’t really about underwear
I’m always divided when the conversation topic shifts towards how Spanish and foreign cultures clash. I have stakes on both sides of the argument: as a local, and as a host to international residents. I try to explain the histories, the causes, the players, and the woes of our values and traditions, breaking them down into more digestible pieces for readers coming to them without the context. I end up somehow mediating between two worlds, trying to reconcile an undeniable fact: that we are all sharing the same space now, and we need to find common ground.
But these clashes are rarely about what they look like on the surface. A complaint about beachwear is never really about beachwear.
Earlier this week, Daniel Adell, president of the Cabanyal-Cañamelar neighbourhood association, went public with a complaint that’s been building for years: people walking the streets in their underwear, tourists sunbathing naked on rooftops, visitors wandering into shops and supermarkets shirtless or in bikinis. He pointed to a specific mix behind it — an influx of young travellers, the growth of short-term rentals, and low-cost carriers that make Valencia an easy, cheap weekend away. Other residents backed him up, describing a neighbourhood that feels increasingly overrun once alcohol enters the mix.
The numbers explain why this keeps happening. Cabanyal-Cañamelar is home to around 19,400 people, and the neighbourhood now has more than 600 properties registered for tourist use — roughly one tourist flat for every 30 residents. Add in a summer where Cabanyal’s beach lost its Blue Flag over water quality, and you have a neighbourhood under real, compounding pressure.
The numbers behind the complaint
The picture becomes even clearer once you look at who’s actually buying in. In 2022–23, foreign buyers accounted for 80% of all property transactions in Cabanyal and neighbouring Malvarrosa, according to a market report from real estate firm Engel & Völkers. Most of those buyers weren’t looking for a primary residence; the typical profile was German or Belgian, buying an old, characterful Cabanyal house to renovate and put back on the rental market.
On top of that, Valencia’s city council recently introduced an ordinance capping tourist accommodation at 8% of a neighbourhood’s population before it’s considered saturated. Cabanyal-Canyamelar is already at roughly 22% — nearly three times that threshold, and that’s before counting the unlicensed flats operating without registration. (Twenty-five neighbourhoods across the city have already blown past the same limit as well.)
But read past the headline about underwear, and the actual complaint is about something bigger: a business model reshaping who the neighbourhood is for. The clothing is just the visible symptom.
From fishing village to coveted land
Cabanyal wasn’t always part of Valencia. It began as an independent settlement — Poble Nou de la Mar — home to fishing families whose lives revolved around the sea, not the city a few kilometres inland. It was only annexed to Valencia in 1897.
A century later, in 1998, the city government under mayor Rita Barberà approved a plan of urban development scheme that would extend Avenida Blasco Ibáñez straight through the neighbourhood to the sea. The plan meant demolishing roughly 1,600 homes, many of them close to a century old, to cut a direct road from the city centre to the coast.
Residents organised. The platform Salvem el Cabanyal formed to fight the plan block by block, and the battle dragged on for years, working its way through the courts. The Supreme Court ultimately backed the neighbourhood. The road was never built. The houses stayed standing.
In some ways, it was a victory — Cabanyal exists today because people refused to let it be flattened. But winning that fight didn’t protect the neighbourhood from what came next.
When resistance becomes a selling point
Once the demolition threat lifted, something else took its place: demand. Rents climbed. Outside investors moved in, drawn by the same colourful fishermen’s houses and seafront position that had made the neighbourhood worth saving in the first place. In 2020, The Guardian named Cabanyal the third-coolest neighbourhood in Europe — and as we know, anything that’s cool is a magnet.
The very qualities that made a place worth defending — authenticity, history, a strong sense of community — became the qualities that make it marketable. Cabanyal went from a neighbourhood the city wanted to erase to one it wanted to sell.
That shift shows up in the property numbers today, and in the tension over how visitors behave, because the two are the same story told from different angles. A neighbourhood that spent two decades fighting to remain itself is now navigating what happens when everyone else decides they want a piece of it too.
I think there’s a real difference between a resident who has put down roots, learned the neighbourhood’s rhythms, and shops at the same market stalls year-round, and a tourist cycling through on a long weekend. But from the outside — from the perspective of a family that’s watched rents rise for twenty years — that distinction can be hard to see, and harder still to feel reassured by.
What can we do for Cabanyal? I could, of course, point towards shopping in the local businesses, or being mindful of local etiquette and culture, but I will settle for trying to understand why a headline about beachwear is landing on a much rawer nerve underneath. From there, we can build.
